GRP lay-ups vary wildly from make to make and generally speaking,
older offshore boats have thicker hulls utilising low tech materials, many
of which I suspect will outlive more modern lighter build, high tech ones.

I was interested to see the wreck of a Joint Services Victoria 34 (Ensis) in
Cherbourg last year. I own one of the Halcyon 27s that were replaced by the
Victorias in 1990.

I was amazed how thick our Halcyon's hull is when I had to cut into it once.
The topsides are half an inch thick and it gets progressively thicker as you
go down; when I installed the log I was cutting through well over an inch of
dense GRP.

Ensis on the other hand had a sizeable hole and she wasn't half as think at
any point, the thickness also seemed to be uniform. Much more what I would
have expected actually.

David

David Balfour wrote:

I was interested to see the wreck of a Joint Services Victoria 34 (Ensis) in
Cherbourg last year.

I spotted that too. Full of shingle. Any idea what happened??? Did you
spot the steel boats nearby? Suffered massive impact but still bent but
sailable.

I was interested to see the wreck of a Joint Services Victoria 34 (Ensis)
in
Cherbourg last year.

I spotted that too. Full of shingle. Any idea what happened??? Did you
spot the steel boats nearby? Suffered massive impact but still bent but
sailable.


Yes I did see her - a similar thing happened once to my dad with his steel
boat. Somebody hit her hard whilst she was unattended on a mooring. Made a
right mess but because she only bent she didn't sink. He's pretty sure any
wood/GRP boat would have been lost. Never found out who did it either.

A story goes that Ensis was trying to get into Cherbourg in poor visibility
and missed, hitting the rocks on the shore. They didn't know what they'd hit
and abandoned ship to the liferaft but pretty quickly realised they could
stand up. I imagine somebody got her out quite sharpish, but there were a
lot of bits missing when I saw her in June.

There was a sleeping bag right by the hole - the guy in that must have had
quite a fright!