Small boat owners

[old man]

1 hour ago, Buckster said:

 A decent length of chain on your anchor warp. 

Always! ☝️

[243deer]

I had a colvic 21 for a while and found that folk loved the idea of coming out fishing with me but baulked at the idea of helping to carry the safety gear from the car to the boat and back again. In the end it just seemed easier and cheaper to organise some charter trips. 

A few things that I did were as follows

Learned how to steer a boat up an estuary using a bucket on a piece of rope after son-in-law reversed into the side and broke the rudder off (a lovely wooden rudder it was too).

Bought a marine band radio and a gps then linked them together (probably get a radio with inbuilt gps these days), registered to get a MMSI number and did a briefing before every trip - including any kids - as to how to summon help via the 'red button'.

Installed a second tractor battery in parallel after one proved only just capable when the glow plug failed and we had to preheat using newspaper.

Have spares of everything.

Make anchors out of scrap as you will lose them if you overshoot when trying to stop uptide of a wreck and overshoot.

Every year in the fishing magazines the RNLI take out full page adverts with a check list for small boat owners reading it one day I realised that I did not really have enough suitable first aid gear - the modern equivalent is to check out their website https://rnli.org/safety/choose-your-activity/angling#calling-for-help it is the obvious common sense things that often get overlooked and cause a problem.

Never trust the sea