Twister_Ken
Well-known member
How about the Seahorse Trust?
What is the worst sailing or marine invention ever?
- Thread starter Nostrodamus
- Start date
CalicoJack
Active member
The Seafarer RDF. For those of you lucky enough never to have come across one, it was an instrument of torture used by my father. He would give the machine to me and you began by inserting a stethoscope like device into your ears. Then having turned it on you were supposed to set the frequency and aim it, it had a large compass on the top of it. You got an earful of static and then a morse letter, I think when you were pointing it at the distant station. You then read the bearing off the top. Repeat three time for different stations and draw a cocked hat, about the size of Luxembourg on your chart. Sorry if this is wrong, only excessive amounts of beer the night before and one of these horrors have made me seasick. In fact just the thought is making me feel a bit queasy.
Greenheart
Well-known member
Your description does sound dreadful. Glad I never encountered it. Doubtless it was regarded as a boon when there was no better way to gauge your whereabouts, but, pretty grim.
Maybe we ought to be more appreciative of today's easy answers than is sometimes expressed here.
Twister_Ken
Well-known member
You bet your sweet bippy it was!
Just seems more dreadful post Decca, post Loran, post GPS.
AntarcticPilot
Well-known member
The procedure was that, having tuned into a beacon signal and made sure it was the correct one - difficult in itself if, like most of us, you aren't proficient in Morse Code - you then rotated the instrument until the signal disappeared. That gave you a bearing on the beacon.
Most of the time the thing was not much use - its range was such that in general, in clear weather you could get compass bearings if the thing would pick up a signal. It did once come into its own on a trip where fog came down off the East Coast of Scotland; bearings on a aeronautical beacon have us distance along track.
The real problem was that it wasn't all that accurate - the nulls were at least 10-20 degrees wide, so the best accuracy was 5-10 degrees. The other problem was that radio beacons were few and far between - AFAIR, there were only 2-3 available between Dunbar and Fraserburgh, and they were aeronautical beacons, at least one of which was off the edge of the charts! You couldn't usually get enough for a fix, so you had to use them as an additional bearing in conjunction with other navigational techniques. Useful in fog; pretty much useless otherwise!
There was another problem - at the wavelengths they operated on, a signal passing obliquely across a coastline could be refracted so the bearing you got wasn't actually pointing towards the beacon! They were really only useful if the signal was pretty much at right-angles to the coast.
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Alan ashore
Member
I have found the telescopic deck brush to be absolutely brilliant for hull scrubbing in the water. (I've always had the Vikan ones which extend to 2.8m or thereabouts - used to be readily available in chandlers, but harder to get hold of now I fear. A quick online search finds various brushes which seem to extend up to the length of a broom handle, which I too would find useless.....)
savageseadog
Well-known member
Boats made from two yachts tacked together
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Greenheart
Well-known member
What, catamarans? 
BrianH
Active member
I beg to differ; although mine was a home-made one with a domestic transistor radio - with the long-wave extended to cover the RDF beacon frequencies - fitted into a wooden pelorus mounted on the aft bulkhead. The pelorus was marked in degrees from the yacht's bow and the null noted and applied to the current compass heading, thus giving the beacon's bearing.
Returning from Holland to NE Yorkshire a lifetime or two ago I was overtaken by a full gale six hours out of Den Helder and lay a-hull for 17 hours, after which my trusty RDF unit and three beacons put me in a surprisingly small cocked hat slap in the middle of the North Sea with my destination, Whitby, 100nm directly west of my position. I had drifted 42nm from my previous DR position before lowering all sail.
The worst yachting development is absolutely teak decks screwed down to the grp base... Time to go to replace another set of teak plugs and sink the screws to accept them.
TQA
New member
- Joined
- 20 Feb 2005
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- 6,815
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- Carribbean currently Grenada
That's assuming you could find 'here' without GPS yourself of course...
Managed it OK for a few miles and a few islands.
TQA
New member
- Joined
- 20 Feb 2005
- Messages
- 6,815
- Location
- Carribbean currently Grenada
Nah they stay in port. It is the ones with GPS and plotters and who believe in them who hit the bricks out in the Carib. Fings ain't where the moving finger says they are.
dunedin
Well-known member
+1 for DSC radio alarms and telescopic boat hooks
And I'll raise you an anchor trip line - which is guaranteed to cause chaos
And I'll raise you an anchor trip line - which is guaranteed to cause chaos
Mudisox
Well-known member
Sunsail yachts.
30boat
N/A
Some wives.
Hadenough
Well-known member
Waterproof speakers.
Puggy
Member
Honda 2.3hp outboards. Hard to start with a wrist breaking kick back, temperamental, leak oil all the time, very noisy, and constructed with a selection of mild steel bolts. Oh, and bloody expensive for what they are: a rattly cement mixer engine.
Simondjuk
Active member
The worst sailing invention is surely the internal combustion engine.
Greenheart
Well-known member
Damn sure we'd all sail much better if we didn't have one.
LittleSister
Well-known member
Mooring/berthing fees. (I can avoid most of the other malign boating inventions!)
Robin
Well-known member
yes to all the above!