Quote:
Originally Posted by Polwart
malthouse - I don't get it? how does a list of my boats distinguishing features make it significantly more likely to get recovered.
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Hi, thanks for your comments - not negative at all really.
There are a number of problems with boat recoveries at the moment, one of them is the time available to the Police to check up on suspicious craft, another is the amount of time that it takes to get a complete description circulated and the breadth of that circulation.
What we would like to see is:-
1) People keeping an accurate and up to date record (with photos) of their vessel so that if stolen those details can be shared quickly. As you say boats are far more likely to be unique than cars etc, but the trick is recording the unique features. Serial numbers are often removed, sometimes it is just a worn sticker and so that in itself is not going to set alarm bells off.
2) A wide network of people who are happy to keep an eye out, including marina staff and engineers as well as the public. This network also needs to have a report that can be put up in a window or on a notice board.
3) Recovered vessels can be identified even after a thief has gone to great lengths to remove the usual features, thus helping the crime to be detected and acted on.
The worst case scenario is that a stolen boat goes some time before being missed and reported, that the details of that craft were not well recorded and that the news of it's loss is neither distributed nor recognised.
The Stolen Boats site works really well, but it relies on people thinking that something is suspicious to start with; we want to give as many people as possible a way of recognising "suspicious" and having good resources available to properly identify it.
I guess what I am trying to say is that by having a good system we can make it so that boat thieves have no way to off-load their wares, either they get caught or their "customers" do.
