Boating thuggery

Two fishing skiffs quietly idle up a canal in the dark. One stops at the entrance of the basin to watch while the other one goes in and docks. The occupant climbs out of the skiff and boards the boat next door sitting on a lift. The grainy short on detail CCTV system records from afar the gyrations involved in trying to steal a MFD from the boat, and it's not elegant. 

This heist was not exactly the work of intellectual giants from the criminal underground. If you knew how the two MFDs were installed a small pair of pliers, Phillips screw driver and maybe about ten minutes would have freed both displays. A screw driver or the ilk is wedged under the panel corner and it was pried away, slowly, painfully, and with great exertion. 

Eventually a couple of epoxied on bolts failed. A corner is lifted and grabbed with hands. Then with a mighty heave the panel snaps in half freeing one side and exposing the MFD. The resulting loud noise from snapping a 3/8' thick piece of acrylic dash panel no doubt resulted in a more expeditious effort to now successfully just get one chart plotter instead of two and the newly created desire to flee soonest.

Unfortunately the entire panel is destroyed, and lot of wiring was to delicately say, very rearranged. As discovered later wiring had been, slashed or just ripped apart. These morons weren't into finesse. They just thankfully dropped the cables off of the MFD, snatched it and fled. To answer the inevitable question that's now rattling around in your head. It's a no! The video wasn't good enough to identify the perps.

   

Xmas 2015

“If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” 

― E.B. White

Is this the best production power boat ever made?

A google search for "The best boat every made" yields really interesting results, but no consensus. They vary from wild west style verbal shoot outs on the Hulltruth forum, to magazines who love to do pieces built around lists. Headlines aver these are the top ten, twenty or even fifty pontoon, sport fishing, bass boats sailboats, and you get the drift.

I'm going to remove all of this ambiguity and just say that the Classic Boston Whaler 13 is the best production power boat ever built. It's an audacious statement, but I think for a variety of reasons it's very true. Timelessness, safety, durability, functionality, high resale value, maintainability, simplicity, and design are my criteria. This little boat excels in all of these.

Local boats I like, the Eco Trekker

I didn't know what to think. At a glance my first thought was it seemed to be an anorexic trimaran sailboat that was demasted. I snapped a pic with my phone took a few more steps, looked again, and went back to the truck to get my real camera. There's more than meets the eye here, and the more I learned the better I liked it.