Boat Stolen Off Mooring

I feel for them I hope they get it back.
When we moored in Red Wharf for 4 years in the 90's we had 2 incidents to do with moorings.
Got to the boatone friday evening but no boat and no mooring buoy, scanning around saw the boat about 100- yards deeper in the bay.Waded to the boat which was just floating off. Saw that the strops were ok and tugged at the ground anchors that still seemed attached. To my amazement I found that I could pull the 50lb ground anchors and ground chain through the soft sand front and back and pull the boat and moorings back to the allocated mooring spot. Somehow the fluidised sand seemed to "float" the anchor more than the displacemet weight reduction you would have expected. Dug the anchors back in the next day and ok for the next 2 years when we moved to Beaumaris. The boat had been fine through some gales over 2 seasons and I was happy with the ground chains, riser etc. People in the RWBay yacht club said it was not uncommon for boats to go walkabout in this way.
The other incident about a year later ()which may explain the first incident) was when walking back to the boat (drying mooring to clean hard sand) we came across a couple of 10 year olds with buckets and spades excitedly digging up my mooring anchors and chain that were about a foot to 18 inches down. They had one anchor almost out and were beavering away on the other. They were nice kids who found it exciting finding big lumps of metal in the sand. I asked after the parents who were sat on the dry sand some distance away and they were mortified as they had not connected their kids digging around with a boat 40 yards away!
 
colingr said:
I trust a large donation to the RNLI will be forthcoming to recover the towage costs.
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I hope the owners insurance company provide a more generous response than the owner could possibly afford!
Opportunity for Good PR for them and good training for the RNLI. The Lads have had a nice day trip out in Liverpool Bay without serious risk to them or their craft, Good training opportunity for any new crew members in a low risk environment.

I am surprised that one of the many wind farm boats patrolling that area didn't capture it and claim salvage!
 
Good to hear the yacht has been found.

I bought a boat that had been stolen from Largs Yachthaven. It was for sale, and disappeared from the marina. It was I who found it was missing, having gone to view it. When the broker phoned the owner to ask where it was, he said he didn't know.

It was found in difficulty off the south tip of Arran with a rowing boat allegedly stolen from Lamlash in tow, rescued and towed into Ayr by a fishing boat. The two sailors scarpered but were apprehended.
I got an overnight test sail back to Largs!
At the resultant trial the owner's sister and B-I-L were found guilty of theft and all three were found not guilty of attempted insurance fraud. The seacocks hadn't been opened yet...
Somebody had to be found guilty of something!
 
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TSB240 said:
I hope the owners insurance company provide a more generous response than the owner could possibly afford!
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I would suspect that would rather depend of how they conclude it came to be where it was found. Is the location consistent with a yacht that has drifted off it's mooring or would it need to have been taken there and abandoned? I saw on the FB link that the mooring appears to have been a drying one and the photo shows a missing shackle pin, from which they have decided it was deliberately undone, but there isn't much information as to how they reached that conclusion. Hopefully the vessel was recovered intact in which case it won't be much of an insurance issue anyhow.
 
A missing shackle pin points more towards the mooring failing or having been tampered with as theft of the boat would more likely only involve slipping the mooring strops etc and then away..
 
They must have read ' Rebecca ' and had similar romantic notions they'd get away with it.

Dinghies - tender or even sailing - get stolen, but stealing a yacht would take serious planning, not least in altering details in appearance - an owner will always know his or her boat.
 
Seajet said:
stealing a yacht would take serious planning, not least in altering details in appearance - an owner will always know his or her boat.
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It might be familiar to its owner but not to the average observer.

This was discussed on the local FB group.If the dodgers and hard top were discarded the boat would have looked just like any AWB to the average public within a few minutes. It might take a bit longer to mask or remove the boat name from the hull.

Given the time it spent floating around (over 4 days at the height of the season) with plenty of local boat owners alerted to keep an eye out without them being removed bears further testament to this.

The only hard thing to disguise would have been the stainless gantry on the stern.

There is still some suggestion that the mooring had been tampered with...Black van with a large trailer was spotted with the yacht prior to going missing. Maybe the plan was to make it look like it had gone adrift and recover it on a trailer. Not very clever as any removal by road off Anglesey could have been tracked by the Cameras. We will never know.

There is previous form for this:
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/yacht-stolen-holyhead-marina-found-10756096
 
A1Sailor said:
At the resultant trial the owner's sister and B-I-L were found guilty of theft and all three were found not guilty of attempted insurance fraud. The seacocks hadn't been opened yet...
Somebody had to be found guilty of something!
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Being nosy, not picky ... If the owner was convicted of insurance fraud it suggests that he knew what was going on, in which case I can't see how it could be theft. Or was there another attempt to liquidate the asset?
 
JumbleDuck said:
Being nosy, not picky ... If the owner was convicted of insurance fraud it suggests that he knew what was going on, in which case I can't see how it could be theft.
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Fear you mis-read, JD: "all three were found not guity of attempted insurance fraud". The theft and insurance fraud were no doubt laid as alternate offences against the sister & b-i-l.
 
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JumbleDuck said:
Being nosy, not picky ... If the owner was convicted of insurance fraud it suggests that he knew what was going on, in which case I can't see how it could be theft. Or was there another attempt to liquidate the asset?
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The owner wasn't found guilty of anything. However, since the yacht was removed from her berth without the owner's knowledge (he told the broker he didn't have a clue where his yacht was) it constituted theft.
I suspect theft was a lesser crime that taking a boat out and sinking it somewhere deep then rowing back to Lamlash!

It was 32 years ago and the detail was courtesy of my mother, who went to the trial at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court...
 
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