Monday 5 August 2013

Hurricane Alert!

My chum Steve rang early on Saturday morning to say that a 'mini-hurricane' had passed through Langstone overnight and Gladys had been turned over on her mooring.
Luckily, a crew was due to go out on an expedition row and they managed to bring her in and turn her right way up. The cover kept the oars and everything safe inside and she was not damaged, though the boatswain put a few more screws in the floorboards just to make sure.
Thanks to Christine Ball for the pic, taken from her paddleboard.

4 comments:

Tillerman said...

Poor Gladys.

Bursledon Blogger said...

Wow, I guess the stability of these boats is brought about by crew weight, glad everything turned out all right.

Chris Partridge said...

It's true that crew weight adds substantially to the stability, especially as a rowing crew sit nice'n'safely in the middle of the boat and don't do stupid things like stand on the bow hauling jibs up or hiking out on the rail, but several sailing boats got inverted in that storm too.....

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

Chris is right.. we had two cruisers go down/over.. a Snapdragon (lift keel) was floating on her side, and one of our day boats sank on her mooring - possibly due to mooring catching on the bow... both were ok thank goodness... Cambermet reported 52 knots for about a 15 minute period in the middle of the night.. same gust also caused a right mess of the dinghys in the club car park.. all over the place...