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Originally Posted by tue
IMHO the Humber Assualt is not a good dive platform. The 5.8m Humber Destroyer on the other hand makes a fantastic platform with a 100hp Yamaha Fourstroke. Quick to plane and fast with 6 divers. Its got a wider beam and sits a little higher in the water than the Assault range, which are realy only suitable for safety boats in Yacht clubs etc IMHO of course.
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I would have to agree with you on this one Paul; I don’t think its ideal either but its what we now have & providing we stay within sensible limits it’ll have to do until the clubs bank balance is sufficient to look for anything else.
Our club has only used Sib’s since 1967 & after pressure from a lot of newer members we decided to move into the 21st century by getting a rib. After a year of reading anything we could find on paper & on the net we had to find something that would fill a number of criteria.
1. It had to fit in a container for storage (this narrowed the field down a lot, most were too wide to fit without totally deflating the tubes)
2. It had to be towed behind an average family saloon car, no one in the club has a 4X4 & the club can’t afford to get one just for towing.
3. Price: As an independent club we tried looking at grants for a new boat but all the avenues we tried were referring back to BSAC, because we are not a BSAC club we gave up in the end.
4. We wanted a boat that would take 6 divers & a Cox.
5. Preferably with a 4-stroke engine to save on fuel & quieter.
So with these things in mind we asked all the various suppliers & manufacturers to supply us information & price on anything that would fit the criteria.
Most were too expensive, too wide, too heavy etc, so in the end we had a short list of only a few.
1. Tornado 5.4m: this would have to have a 2-stroke engine to bring it close to our budget & would have to still be partly deflated to fit in the container.
2. Humber Assault 5.5m with the Suzuki 70hp 4-stroke.
3. Humber Destroyer 5.5 with a 2-stroke engine.
Humber knew exactly what we wanted the RIB for & how many divers we wanted to carry, at no time did they say the Destroyer would be a better boat for this purpose or that the Assault would struggle to carry 6 divers. (in fact they advatised this combination as sutable for 7 divers)They even fitted the bottle rack so they couldn’t say they didn’t know we wanted it for diving, which is a bit of a pain because if we had known we would have waited a little longer to get something better.
The Assault with the Suzuki engine is very good on fuel, (it uses half what the Sib with a 2-stroke used) easy to tow, launch & back into the container.
If we knew then what we know now we would have gone for a 5.8m Destroy, XS-RIB (these only came on the market a couple of months after placing the order) or a Tornado.
) RIB, the 6.3m model. Real plus point about it is that it is very wide beam so lots of room and stability at rest. Good in a chop too. Get a 150 Merc Opti and you can't go wrong. Ask Andre (who posts here) to quote.
Humber’s answer to this was they moved the consol back because some people were complaining about a rough ride when driving the boat. So now we have to have 2 people sitting at the front of the boat to level it out with all the equipment right at the back, or lay the bottles on the floor in front of the consol.
