dramatic sea rescue

[Derek]

Charles, Fiona and Simon,
We glad to hear you are all ok.

Scorpion RIBs reply to RIBnet Forums

Dramatic mid channel rescue

Having read the report on RIBnet Forums, Scary, comes to mind indeed but in the last paragraph you are correct it will not sink but to allay any fears at the time with people who do not know about Scorpion’s will be very difficult.
We would like to go into some detail the history of the newly acquired second hand cruiser Hull No 13 purchased by Mr C St.Clair-Bolam
She was built in 1997 and was the prototype test RIB,
For aesthetic purposes we fitted the valves on the inside and put a diaphragm around the tube carrier and attached the valve through this to stop any ingress of water into the cabin in the event of water getting behind the tubes which worked very well and kept it dry and damp free. We tested her quite extensively with very positive results.
The next cruiser to be built was Hull No 24 for Mr C Strickland who had twin 225Hp Mercury’s and did 1000’s of miles without problems to the tubes, after a year he decided to replace the engines with twin 300 Merc Promax’s. On a trip around Scotland in very heavy seas he encountered a
similar problem. The tubes parted company from the boat as the seas had split the bonding strip and water went into the cabin. Lessons were learnt and from that point on the valves were placed on the outside of the tubes and the tube carrier had no holes making the cabin totally watertight in the event of tube failure.
An other valuable lesson was the underside bonding strips at the nose section must be allowed to flex otherwise being too stiff they have a tendency to tear, in our policy of quality we tended to over build subsequently built in a problem. To rectify the fault less layers of hypalon and the curved strips put on with less tension to enable us to achieve this.
With tubes on the boat being held into position by the tube carrier and the top deck, it is too rigid and any stuffing will cause the pressure to intensify at the bonding strip area. The result is that the bonding strip has to give, once the water has bridged the strip it hydraulics the tubes away and into the cabin. We at Scorpion (one of the few) produce our own tube that is why the quality is always of a high standard and have very few failures. We have built several cruisers with tubes attached in the same way, one of which went up to the artic circle and back, an other with 600Hp inboard diesel’s has done many 1000’s of miles without problems of any kind.
The best answer is to have a hard nose, the new cruiser has this as standard, and this will alleviate any such apprehensions. Hull No 13 did not have a hard nose as the original owner wanted a user-friendly boat using the sponsons as a buffer.