Performance A Must In Ski Towing Boats
The Age
Friday May 28, 1993
With a driver and an observer as required for safety, and the added weight of a two-person television camera crew an board, boats towing skiers in the Moomba Masters needed plenty of performance.
It was not that speed was high, but there was a need to accelerate quickly and have enough torque to manipulate the boat to maintain an accurate speed through the slalom course.
Flightcraft 18 XL OB boats were used for the two-week-long tournament and they were powered by Mercury 200 outboard engines.
This is one of the bigger Mercury engines, having plenty of torque and producing just on 150 kilowatts of power.
The engines were prepared specially for the water ski tournament and were among more than 30 Mercury engines used in the tournament.
Others were used on Mercury's Quicksilver inflatable boats, Bermuda aluminium punts and some specialised craft used during the night pageant on the river.
The Bermuda punts were used by archers shooting burning arrows high in the air which fell back into the Yarra.
THAT SINKING FEELING ONE of the difficulties of buyiny a used boat is assessing its condition properly.
Bridge Marine at the St Kilda marina, which will assess a boat's condition for a prospective buyer to ensure its integrity, told recently of a newly purchased used boat which did not look too bad," said Bridge Marine's Doug McNaughtan.
``It was a clean and straight boat and the new owner and friend drove it slowly out of the marina here, and it all looked pretty good.
``The bay was flat and perfectly suitable for testing a newly purchased boat, so we were surprised when one of them came in here dripping wet for help not 15 minutes later," he said.
``The boat occupant's friend could not swim and was clinging to one of those piles used to mark the shallow water off the marina," said Mr McNaughtan.
The boat? It was on the bottom.
After leaving the marina, the operator had opened the throttle after leaving the marina and the first time the bow lifted and then dropped back onto the water, a chunk of the hull nearly a metre long broke free and water flooded into the boat.
``The boat had repaired and the piece of material used to repair it had simply fallen out the first time any stress was placed on it," he said.
On another occassion, a similar fault was spotted when the boat was checked before the new owner launched it.
``The area around the chine did not look right so we gave it a kick and sure enough the chine area opened up," he said.
© 1993 The Age
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