Blue Sunray
Well-Known Member
I'm sure I've seen that boat in OV recently, perhaps they were shooting another MDL video?
Using that logic how has the post to the SE survived relatively unscathed?
I'm glad you added 'relatively'. I was trying to be lighthearted but much of the buoyage around the entrance to Soton Water seems to require occasional straightening out and repainting to remove the scars of close encounters.
Thinking about it the QE2 got stuck on the bank back in 2008 and a car ferry was carelessly parked there more recently so you're not wrong :encouragement:
If only someone bothered to mark Brambles on a map, or something similar, to help skippers.
Testament to the quality of the boat if it didn't pull a shaft or bracket!
Testament to the quality of the boat if it didn't pull a shaft or bracket!
Thinking about it the QE2 got stuck on the bank back in 2008 and a car ferry was carelessly parked there more recently so you're not wrong :encouragement:
I'd be surprised if the shaft was still straight after that, but yes, the hull has done well to remain watertight after such a high speed impact.
Also, I think the current colour coding of charts leaves something to be desired.
e.g.
On leaving Chichester Harbour on a low Spring Tide, you might think that the course following the black arrow was a reasonable one.
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Sadly dropping in a couple of zoom levels shows some of those depths as "0.1", which is fine for a Hovercraft, but really quite unhelpful for a motorboat or sailing yacht.
What's even worse is that the bar keeps shifting. I was in an area where the charted depth was supposedly 2m+ - the depth alarm went off and I could see the pebbles scrolling past with maybe 1ft clearance.
Aiming to be maybe 50m East of the Bar Beacon and then heading roughly SSW to the outer marker seems to work most of the time.
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However the car transporter was different, it had other issues so was deliberately beached there
That's what they tried to pretend at the time but I think you will find that the vessel developed such a severe list during the turn round the Bramble Bank that steering and propulsion was lost resulting in the grounding .
The MAIB report makes interesting reading https://www.gov.uk/maib-reports/listing-flooding-and-grounding-of-vehicle-carrier-hoegh-osaka
Yes, I recall the choices were beach it or turn over, and they wisely selected the lesser of two weevils.
Blinking Fairline parts owner. Probably navigating with an AA road map.
Years ago I was pottering around the area to check bearings and so on. When I came to review my gps track I could see that I'd been rather closer to Bramble Bank than I'd actually intended. I felt very stupid and would have felt more so had there been a metre less water under my keel. I would have expected other people to think I was very, very stupid and to laugh at me rather than with me.
Latest incident is one of those things: no-one hurt; a few people inconvenienced and some plastic and metal damaged.
The reason there's no post on the bank itself is that it would last about 48 hours before some behemoth of the seas cut the corner and took it down.:encouragement:
Yes, I recall the choices were beach it or turn over, and they wisely selected the lesser of two weevils.
Sadly dropping in a couple of zoom levels shows some of those depths as "0.1", which is fine for a Hovercraft, but really quite unhelpful for a motorboat or sailing yacht.
They didn’t “select” anything - the ship was heeled over so far the rudder was mostly out of the water and it screwed round out of control. It ended up where it did purely by chance.
The “deliberately beached” story was put out by the PR department before anyone really knew what had happened; since it was in the media along with the initial story it has stuck in a lot of people’s minds, but there’s not a shred of truth to it.
Pete