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A nice mackeral like this head for the freezer Not another "Effin" shark? promptly got pulled around the back of his boat as whatever it was swam in lazy five metre circles below us. After much swearing, puffing and encouragement from us to stop fannying about and land the bloody thing, Noel, with skill and cunning, managed to bust it off. Oh, rats. Oh, well. Score one for Mr Anonymous Biggie. As he replaced his trace, I snagged another little livie, and soon Livie Part Deux was heading to the bottom. Not a long trip in only six metres but a pretty perilous one, as within seconds of it reaching it's destination, Noel shouted "bloody hell! It's still there!" Sure enough, the same thing happened. Not just once, but five times! As late afternoon turned to early evening we finally got tired of feeding whatever it was a succession of small fish on 50lb fishing lines, so instead in the end we decided to clip a nice strong 150lb nylon trace straight on to a short rope cleated to the stern. That'll get 'im! This time, we were gonna find out what this beast was! We had a fair idea by then, we just wanted to see it. Fat chance guys. You know a fish is pretty darn big when it can pull a 25ft heavy glass boat in a short arc before popping 150lb nylon trace like dental floss. What was it? No proof, but I'd give you odds that it was one of the huge cod (groper, bass, whatever) that lurk among the bommies and reefs in this area. We never saw it, but damn, that was fun, and funny! Catching fish, yeah, we did that, got some beauties too, but my stand-out memory of this trip has to be that One That Got Away! Well, leaving more tales of the WA trip for later issues, I thought I might touch on something of more local concern for a minute. This last boatshow I was helping my old mate Bill Hohepa with his promo work on the Marco Boats stand and was particularly taken with their little 440 Dory: basically a small, tiller-steer uber-dinghy. Apart from its solid build and huge internal volume which are impressive enough on their own, this one has foam filled floatation panels built in to the sides of the boat just below the gunnels, and on a TV mounted beside it there was a DVD loop showing what happened when the folks at Marco had it on Lake Karapiro trying to sink it. With four guys in the stern and the bung out, sure enough they managed to get the whole boat awash, water pouring in over the transom in a rather perturbing way, until it was full. The guys then moved for'ard a tad and immediately the boat popped back up to be clear of the water level, so that bailing would be able to empty the dory. Very nice but! The most notable thing was that this internal floatation also stopped the boat from heeling over and rolling. We all know why. Underfloor floatation is all very good, but you cover that deck with a foot or so of water and the boat quickly becomes totally unstable as the floatation does its level best to get back on top again. The simple idea of having gunnel-high side floatation in the boat means that if the boat did start to heel slightly, it hits the floatation and is held steady. No tipping. It was beautiful to see in action. No roll-over and no-one in the water. Now as soon as I got home from the show, I saw a short you-tube clip posted on the fishing.net.nz site about a guy beach-launching through the surf down south somewhere. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uLJDPmTBdLQ&feature=share He managed to stall his motor, and after one white wave over the back, he was full of water, and slowly but surely rolled over and lost the boat. Now all this stirred up cries of anger from the on-line experts: he was an idiot, no PFD, an idiot, no idea what he was doing, an idiot, and now the inevitable cry of, "We need to have licensing to control idiots like this!" As I watched that boat roll slowly, despite the best efforts of the guy in the boat to hold down the high side to level her out, my thoughts were not how a license in his wallet would have somehow kept the boat afloat, but rather I was thinking 'if that boat has some floatation high in the gunnels such as say the Marco 440 Dory for instance, he would never have lost his boat at all'. So I posted this up on the forum: "I was just thinking, perhaps instead of suggesting legislation to licence boaters, how about something to encourage boat builders to make their product safer? I wonder, had that boat had gunnel level floatation would he even have rolled at all?" If all boats had high floatation sufficient to keep the boat afloat no matter what (within reason), how many disasters at sea would that prevent? Perhaps far more than licensing of the boaties themselves? The discussion of licensing of boaties then heated up after a tragedy at Mangere the next day, when a father had his kids out for a run in a dinghy he had just been given. Again, calls for licensing to stop this terrible waste of lives. But really, if that boat had been buoyant and stable even with water in it, would this awful tragedy have happened? Then again, if we had people, say, local harbour masters or their proxies, on the ramps checking boats and owners for life jackets, safety equipment and so on, basically, just enforcing the laws and by-laws we have in place at the moment, would that not stop those disasters from happening that are now prompting the calls for boaties to have compulsory licensing? What do you think? Polite letters to Keith, I am sure he will be happy to hear your thoughts. Me? I'm gonna be in the Solomon Islands again! July/August 2012 Professional Skipper 53