In article ,
KingOfTheApes wrote:
On Aug 19, 3:43*pm, Morten Reistad wrote:
In article ,
Two meter troll wrote:





On Aug 15, 7:21 am, ComandanteBanana
wrote:
On Aug 15, 3:20 am, Two meter troll wrote:

Hey, where's the real place with humans, Alaska, Scandinavia?

any place where you get actual sailors.
I worked the gulf for a while and was on the whole unimpressed. what i
observed was a total lack of licensing, no familiarity with either
inland or international rules of the road, skill levels in boat
handling and navigations somewhere around those of a brain damaged
squid, drunkenness at the helm, no enforcement at all, trash all over
the place, a disregard for every one else on or in the water, and an
over whelming attitude that folks don't actually have to follow any
rules. * In short; Bubbas (I cant actually think of anything that acts
as slovenly and boorish as the majority of southern boaters).

In Scandinavia the greater Oslo Fjord area is like this. Sheltered
waters, lots of yuppies with daddys gofast-boat; as you call them ;
"bubbas" with cabin cruisers, and rich drunkards with cigar
boats. The first day of main holiday you can barely get through on the
VHF ch 16 because of all the disaster messages. Fortunatly, the vast
majority of damage is self-inflicted. [1]


When I was in Norway in 2000 everything looked good and unpolluted,
but I noticed you were being fed too many American TV shows.

Garbage TV is the same everywhere.

I guess what happened is that some people bought into the "American
dream" (those who could afford it anyway), and started doing like in

No, we don't have much of the industrial pollution. Rules for the
oil industry are strict; and the plants tend to have localised
pollution, and are put in some desolate place between steep
mountains. The cruise ships don't go to those fjords.

They even put back some water in the waterfalls for the tourists
to watch. Normally any waterfall of any size would have been put
in pipes to make hydropower.


the series "Miami Vice." But I assure you, that those cigarette boats
do pollute, and leave a trail of garbage while terrorizing kayakers
and other civilized people.

Nowadays, we MAKE a lot of those boats. And the Swedes make a lot
of the engines. Also sold in America.

The entrepreneurs among us saw Miami Vice, and thought "I can make
those cheaper and better".

-- mrr

In article ,
KingOfTheApes wrote:
On Aug 22, 12:37 pm, "Lee Bell" wrote:

Well, maybe they heard of the coral reefs in the tropical waters of
the Caribbean dying because of all the pollution and motorboats that
anchor in the wrong places.

By the way, do you have many coral reefs in the UK?

We are only discovering the northern reefs this decade.

They are deep, 50-400 m; and have not been known except
as good fishing places. The shallowest is in the
Trondheim fjord right by the gusing currents at
40 meters plus.

Now the offshore waters are being properly charted, and
there are weekly discoveries of new reefs offshore.

Fishing regulations will have to be radically rewritten.
Lots of the reefs have substrantial trawler damage.

Putting in an oil platform makes minuscule damage in
comparison. After all, the only have a 100x100m footprint,
and want that on solid rock or deep shellsand.

We expect new, detailed charts over all the continental
shelf to be issued sometime in 2010.

-- mrr

In article ,
-hh wrote:
KingOfTheApes wrote:

Many people that are into motorboating are poorly educated and
couldn't care less about the consequences of their actions.

Kind of an interesting self-contradiction you're making, by first
talking about how these boats are huge and expensive, yet now they're
owned by uneducated high school dropouts, which is a demographic with
very low incomes. With just a McDonald's job, how can they afford the
gas to be constantly running their boats?

The "salarimen" have taken to motorboating, with cabin cruisers.
They have the cash, but less time to learn to operate the craft.

Most marinas are built for boats up to 39'/12m length, 11'6"/3.5m
wide. The new cigar boats and cabin cruisers are too big for them,
so they are often forced to anchoring.


But motorboat pollution contributes to "the soup" out there too. You
can even smell the gas, and I doubt it that it would be safe to swim
in the intracostal anymore.

You sure that you're not smelling naturally occurring organics?
Afterall, the ICW runs through a lot of muddy marshes and estuaries.

There is remarkably little pollution from watercraft of any type
around here.

Their main threat though is to life and property...

"Here are some startling statistics regarding boating accidents from
the United States Coast Guard:

In 2005, states and jurisdictions reported a total of 12,942,414
registered recreational boats compared with 12,781,476 in 2004.
The 4,969 boating accidents ...

0.04% incidence. Yes, very 'startling'. You would have to boat for
over 25 years just to get up to a 1% risk.

There are some "peak" risk groups. The insurance for a cigar boat
without a proper skipper exam and practice is now about $100 per
horsepower per year. With proper traning documented you can almost
cut a digit from those prices. Some insurance agencies refuse to
insure 100 hp, 12 tons or 13 m/42' without skipper certifications.

The most common types of boats involved in reported accidents were
open motorboats (45%), personal watercraft (PWC) (26%), and cabin
motorboats (14%).

And 15% missing. FYI, this data is statistically meaningless without
the context of the relevant contributing base population also being
provided.

Increases were observed in the number of reported
fatalities involving PWC, cabin motorboats, inflatables, sailboats,
and houseboats from 2004.

With 160,938 more registered watercraft, is this really surprising
that the observed total also increased?

A decrease was observed in the number of fatalities
involving canoes/kayaks and rowboats...

Was this because they as a group became safer, or because they as a
group became fewer? You don't know because that can only be answered
if the relevant contributing base population context was included ...
which here it is not. As such, you have "true statements" being made
that are functionally meaningless because they fail to determine
causality.

Indeed.

Authorities here are reviewing ideas of zone separation for different
craft. 5kn speed limits proposed for motorboats outside zones, and
licensing for larger crafts with a point system for revoking the
licence.

-- mrr

In article ,
KingOfTheApes wrote:
On Aug 22, 3:58 pm, "Lee Bell" wrote:
do yourself a favor and carry a hand held uhf radio or something and
if you see people, motorboat or not, acting like asses call the police/
coast guard."

Why not have a VHF? You can listen in to the VTC, and be told about the
big boats arriving in good time. I have a lot of use for that when
sailing inside VTC zones.

Some of them are real nice, real captains. Once one in Key Largo
helped us recover a sunken kayak.

It's like there's decent people driving SUVs, just that many of them
are reckless and they have made the wrong vehicle choice.


Here are a couple of clues. Power boaters have been picked on, harassed,
limited, and taxed almost out of their activities. It takes hours for them
to get where their fishing, diving, or other activities take place because
they have to travel at idle speed to keep manatees never seen in the area,
safe just in case they every happen to be there. They pay substantially
more for the fuel that the use simply because they use it on the water.
They bought their very expensive boats either because that's what they
enjoy, because that's what it takes to do what they bought a boat for, or
because they don't have the time to use slower, more economical vessels. No
matter what the reason, they have a right and a right to expect to be able
to use them to their maximum potential when and where the law allows.

The law abiding skippers sometimes have a pretty hard time with all the
other craft. Just listen to the commercial fishing skippers.

Sometimes that law doesn't exist or is not enforced and they just
follow the Law of the Jungle. If you talk about the channels their
speeds are not terribly willd, but still you are a sitting duck.

In certain spots of the intracostal and the beach, though, they just
fly over the water with their cigarette boats. It's common sight there
that they just fly by past the buoys, a few hundred feet from the
beach. If you go there to relax, their roaring motors will remind you
there's no place to hide. Well, try ear plugs perhaps.

C'mon, there's no control to this? Can't we have them stay at least 1
mile from shore?

Zoning?

You guys, and I, for that matter, have chosen a slower, more sedate and less
expensive mode of transportation for very different reasons. We don't us
kayaks to do the things others do in power, or sail boats. We can get closer
to nature, into places that power boats can and should not go, and generally
relax in ways unique to us. Why not do that in places best suited to what
we enjoy? Why encroach on the few places left that power boaters can use
their transportation the way the want and bitch about them doing it?

I've said the weekends belong to the predators. I even grant them the
daylight because I don't want to see their garbage. But going past the
buoys at the beach is reasonable, since staying within them would make
me a danger to the swimmers, and I don't want to become the predator.

With sailboats, we can escape to the ocean. Very few bubbas and incompetent
motorboat skippers there.

One more thing to keep in mind. It costs you nothing to wait a minute for a
power boat to pass. It probably costs a boat 25 feet or more in length, and
certainly the high speed monohulls you guys were complaining about, anywhere
from $10 to $20 extra to slow down and return to a plane. Perhaps that will
give you at least a little understanding of why they are so reluctant to do
so.

The thing with a motorboat is that you don't know if stopping puts you
at lesser or greater danger. You just have to predictable, and
hopefully they'll steer around you.

A word from some commercial captains I know.

Pleasure boaters are normally not aware of the traffic control and zone
separation in place; and even some quite experiencd amateur skippers are
clueless about how a large, commercial vessel stops. Hint: You don't want
to be in front of them.

They try to manouver as well as they can; but they really need the zone
space they are given in and out of ports. If you cross the separation zones
please do so at a fixed course and speed at as sharp an angle to the lanes
as you can. The large ships have automatic anti-collision trackers that
are _extremely_ useful in such waters, but they tend to give lots of
false alarms on small craft that zigzag in and out of lanes.

I just cheched the Miami area on commercial charts. It is chock full
of separation sones and report requirements almost halfway to Bahamas.
If you are unaware of these zones you will make a lot of commercial ships
hate you intensely when you are there, even in a Kayak. Especially
in a kayak.

You want to cross the channel, no problem. Find someplace where speed is
limited and go for it. God knows such places are all over the Intracoastal
You want to share areas where boats go faster, great, do it out of the
channels, in shallower water where your vessel is designed to go and power
boats aren't.

There's no safe intersections in those channels, much less a signal
light.

Nope. But when you cross, do so in a way predictable to the large vessels.

They also need 5-7 knots of speed to be able to manouver properly. With
less than 3 knots they are dead in the water and need thrusters and/or
tugs to operate. You really DON'T want them to have to press the brake for
you.

You just go for it and pray to come out alive.

You want consideration, so do the power boaters. You want consideration
from them, try giving it to them.

I do. The problem is NOT them actually. But the whole set up where we
--kayakers and canoeists-- are exposed to uncessary dangers, and where
they can speed, drink, get high, be reckless, and get away with it.

A few inquests has done away with that here. Suddenly the promising
salarymen were cons with drug&alcohol and violence crimes on their
records. Not what you would like on your CV.

Several of these inquests had other, experienced boaters who kept
their calm as witnesses.

Now, before you guys get all excited and tell everybody about the
occasionally jerk, ask yourself this. For every time a power boater
inconvenienced you, how many times do you suppose the power boater was
inconvenienced by you.

Lee

Some steering from them to avoid you is NOT an inconvenience. The
ocean is full of different species, and we all must get along, or
declare that the only law out there is the Law of the Jungle.

Hey, people who got "money to burn" can try sailing, that is more
rewarding and totally environmentally friendly. Motorboats which are
needed for fishing are OK too since they serve a purpose. And then you
can always choose the smaller motorboats out there.

Money to burn, indeed. I could buy a complete set of diving gear
for what a new Genua costs. And I have a 22 year old 36' boat.

-- mrr

Morten Reistad wrote:

Money to burn, indeed. I could buy a complete
set of diving gear for what a new Genua costs.
And I have a 22 year old 36' boat.

That might depend on what calls a 'complete' set.

As in everything else, there's the bare-bones basics and then there's
the more serious stuff, particularly when it comes to specialized
ares. For example, the Ikelite SS-200 strobe heads I have for my old
35mm underwater camera cost me $1K each...and they aren't compatible
with going digital. Another high ticket item is a quality drysuit for
use in colder climates. Figure spending $2K for that with one basic
set of underwear. Its all too easy to have the same stereotype of
'bubba diver' recreationalist as it is for power boating in a 17ft
fiberglass runabout with too much horsepower & beer.


-hh

On Aug 24, 6:28*am, Morten Reistad wrote:
In article ,





KingOfTheApes wrote:
On Aug 19, 3:43*pm, Morten Reistad wrote:
In article ,
Two meter troll wrote:

On Aug 15, 7:21 am, ComandanteBanana
wrote:
On Aug 15, 3:20 am, Two meter troll wrote:

Hey, where's the real place with humans, Alaska, Scandinavia?

any place where you get actual sailors.
I worked the gulf for a while and was on the whole unimpressed. what i
observed was a total lack of licensing, no familiarity with either
inland or international rules of the road, skill levels in boat
handling and navigations somewhere around those of a brain damaged
squid, drunkenness at the helm, no enforcement at all, trash all over
the place, a disregard for every one else on or in the water, and an
over whelming attitude that folks don't actually have to follow any
rules. * In short; Bubbas (I cant actually think of anything that acts
as slovenly and boorish as the majority of southern boaters).

In Scandinavia the greater Oslo Fjord area is like this. Sheltered
waters, lots of yuppies with daddys gofast-boat; as you call them ;
"bubbas" with cabin cruisers, and rich drunkards with cigar
boats. The first day of main holiday you can barely get through on the
VHF ch 16 because of all the disaster messages. Fortunatly, the vast
majority of damage is self-inflicted. [1]

When I was in Norway in 2000 everything looked good and unpolluted,
but I noticed you were being fed too many American TV shows.

Garbage TV is the same everywhere.

Yep, but it always comes from the same place.


I guess what happened is that some people bought into the "American
dream" (those who could afford it anyway), and started doing like in

No, we don't have much of the industrial pollution. Rules for the
oil industry are strict; and the plants tend to have localised
pollution, and are put in some desolate place between steep
mountains. The cruise ships don't go to those fjords.

They even put back some water in the waterfalls for the tourists
to watch. Normally any waterfall of any size would have been put
in pipes to make hydropower.

Wherever you go in Norway, you don't see piles of garbage, not even a
piece of paper on the ground. I wonder if our politicians could ever
go there and bring back some ideas.


the series "Miami Vice." But I assure you, that those cigarette boats
do pollute, and leave a trail of garbage while terrorizing kayakers
and other civilized people.

Nowadays, we MAKE a lot of those boats. And the Swedes make a lot
of the engines. Also sold in America.

The entrepreneurs among us saw Miami Vice, and thought "I can make
those cheaper and better".

-- mrr- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well, it's like Volvo. They also got into the SUV craze... Not as
stupid as our Stupid Unnecessary Vehicles but still unnecessary. Good
old fashioned station wagons are still the best.

On Aug 23, 4:39*pm, -hh wrote:
KingOfTheApes wrote:

Many people that are into motorboating are poorly educated and
couldn't care less about the consequences of their actions.

Kind of an interesting self-contradiction you're making, by first
talking about how these boats are huge and expensive, yet now they're
owned by uneducated high school dropouts, which is a demographic with
very low incomes. *With just a McDonald's job, how can they afford the
gas to be constantly running their boats?

First of all, there are "lions" out there and "wannabes." Meaning
there are many big yachts and cigarette boats owned by the filthy
rich, and then crappy motorboats of all kinds owned by the ones that
want to imitate the others. The former you see either cruising slowly
on their yachts or racing by on their fast boats. The latter are the
ones that bring their extended family to the islands out there and
leave all the garbage behind.

In other words, motorboating has become democratic and even the dog
participates in the affair. Actually, there are ads on TV that promote
motorboating as a fun thing for the whole family --and the dog.

It's a matter of STATUS. Just like cars. "Money to burn"=Big Yacht &
SUV. "Survivor"=old car and boat.


But motorboat pollution contributes to "the soup" out there too. You
can even smell the gas, and I doubt it that it would be safe to swim
in the intracostal anymore.

You sure that you're not smelling naturally occurring organics?
Afterall, the ICW runs through a lot of muddy marshes and estuaries.

I can tell the smell of gas. And you can see it floating all over the
place.

And when a motorboats goes by, you can get some serious second hand
smoke.


Their main threat though is to life and property...

"Here are some startling statistics regarding boating accidents from
the United States Coast Guard:

In 2005, states and jurisdictions reported a total of 12,942,414
registered recreational boats compared with 12,781,476 in 2004.
The 4,969 boating accidents ...

0.04% incidence. *Yes, very 'startling'. *You would have to boat for
over 25 years just to get up to a 1% risk.

I bet many of those registered boats don't even make it to the water
(they look good parked on the driveway). And the kayaks stay away from
those motorboat highways, so the statistics may be misleading.

But your common sense tells you they are a real threat. More than
terrorists, say.

On Aug 23, 5:57 pm, "Lee Bell" wrote:
Batteries may get damaged by sea water or just get depleted. I have
one on my canoe to power my trolling motor. I changed to AGM though
because they are water and leakproof.

Batteries in boats are generally protected against sea water or of a type
that is not easily damaged, like the AGM battery you use. As it happens I
use them too. As for getting depleted, that's what chargers are for. By
the way, your battery is much more likely to become depeleted than mine.
Perhaps it Kayakers that are leaving them.

You do know that, by putting a trolling motor on your kayak, you're
classified as a power boat, right?

Oh, give me a break. At worst I'd be a hybrid. Small, slow, noiseless
and backed up by paddles.

And still I've got the kayak that goes on banana power alone (meaning
I eat the bananas that power the boat).


Many people that are into motorboating are poorly educated and
couldn't care less about the consequences of their actions. I think
MOTORBOATING IS LARGELY FOR COUCH POTATOES THAT WANT TO
HAVE A DEGREE OF ADVENTURE IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS.

Yet, in the same post, you identified yourself as a power boater.

But not a threat to anything. Certainly not a couch potato looking for
adventure.


My anchor weighs 1 1/2 lbs... Terrible threat to the reefs.

It's almost exactly the same threat as mine. An anchor that sets and stays
in place, does very little damage to anything and there's already a law
requiring people to anchor in adjacent sand areas rather than on coral.
Chain and line, on the other hand, can do quite a bit of damage, whether
attached to a kayak or different kind of power boat.

I'd look before I anchor to a reef, don't you?


How much you need for a motorboat?

Which power boat? I have three and, as I've already mentioned, a kayak.
Anchors for each boat is designed for the boat I use it with. My smallest
power boat uses an anchor just like the one I use for the kayak.

OK, why don't you get rid of the big ones?

But motorboat pollution contributes to "the soup" out there too. You
can even smell the gas, and I doubt it that it would be safe to swim
in the intracostal anymore.

What you can smell is not harming the reefs. As for what you doubt, I
suggest you learn a bit more before getting it wrong again. If you're
talking about human waste by those on boats, I'm afraid you'll have to
include kayakers in your list. It's legal for either of us to use the
ocean as a bathroom. It is not legal for me to discharge my head directly
overboard or to discharge my holding tank within coastal waters. The sewage
outfalls in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties, on the other hand, pump
millions of gallons of partially treated sewage and chemicals onto the reefs
every day.

Can the government ever be that bad? They claim they treat everything
at Virginia Key...


The most common types of boats involved in reported accidents were
open motorboats (45%) . . .

You know that includes your kayak, right?

I've been boating in south Florida for 54 years. I've never had an
accident. Imagine that.

Lee

Do you do kayaking by any chance, or you just represent the
motorboating association?

On Aug 24, 7:07*am, Morten Reistad wrote:

The thing with a motorboat is that you don't know if stopping puts you
at lesser or greater danger. You just have to predictable, and
hopefully they'll steer around you.

A word from some commercial captains I know.

Pleasure boaters are normally not aware of the traffic control and zone
separation in place; and even some quite experiencd amateur skippers are
clueless about how a large, commercial vessel stops. Hint: You don't want
to be in front of them.

They try to manouver as well as they can; but they really need the zone
space they are given in and out of ports. If you cross the separation zones
please do so at a fixed course and speed at as sharp an angle to the lanes
as you can. The large ships have automatic anti-collision trackers that
are _extremely_ useful in such waters, but they tend to give lots of
false alarms on small craft that zigzag in and out of lanes.

I just cheched the Miami area on commercial charts. It is chock full
of separation sones and report requirements almost halfway to Bahamas.
If you are unaware of these zones you will make a lot of commercial ships
hate you intensely when you are there, even in a Kayak. Especially
in a kayak.

Basically there are two kinds of zones he "THE HAVES" & "THE HAVES
NOT."

And the kayakers must stay in the area of the haves not, because if
not they are fair game.

Otherwise, go out when the haves are working or sleeping.

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:06:47 -0700 (PDT), ComandanteBanana
wrote:

On Aug 24, 7:07=A0am, Morten Reistad wrote:

The thing with a motorboat is that you don't know if stopping puts you
at lesser or greater danger. You just have to predictable, and
hopefully they'll steer around you.

A word from some commercial captains I know.

Pleasure boaters are normally not aware of the traffic control and zone
separation in place; and even some quite experiencd amateur skippers are
clueless about how a large, commercial vessel stops. Hint: You don't want
to be in front of them.

They try to manouver as well as they can; but they really need the zone
space they are given in and out of ports. If you cross the separation zon=
es
please do so at a fixed course and speed at as sharp an angle to the lane=
s
as you can. The large ships have automatic anti-collision trackers that
are _extremely_ useful in such waters, but they tend to give lots of
false alarms on small craft that zigzag in and out of lanes.

I just cheched the Miami area on commercial charts. It is chock full
of separation sones and report requirements almost halfway to Bahamas.
If you are unaware of these zones you will make a lot of commercial ships
hate you intensely when you are there, even in a Kayak. Especially
in a kayak.

Basically there are two kinds of zones he "THE HAVES" & "THE HAVES
NOT."

And the kayakers must stay in the area of the haves not, because if
not they are fair game.

Otherwise, go out when the haves are working or sleeping.
Damn, what an ass, you must be French