Having a boat you can trail means having the best of all worlds. If you are happy to spend the time and effort putting it in the water and retrieving it again afterwards, you can have the freedom to go boating wherever you choose.

It’s critical you know what you are doing though and that you have a vehicle that is powerful enough to tow a heavy boat and trailer. Make sure you check the recommended towing weight for your car and do not exceed this.

Also check the trailer thoroughly, especially if you bought the boat and trailer second hand. Get it serviced so you know it isn’t corroded, that the ball bearings and axel are properly greased and that the brakes actually work.

And if you are buying a boat on a trailer, make sure you get a light board with a road legal registration number plate on the back with the correct length of cable. A bit of cardboard taped on the back with no light board is illegal.

I believe that if you’d plan to be safe on the water there is no excuse for not being safe (and legal) on dry land.

To keep you safe when towing a boat, here are four useful videos produced by Practical Boat Owner (PBO) with their partners Land Rover. They show how to check the trailer is safe before setting off, how to reverse with a trailer on the back of the car, how to launch the boat from the trailer and how to recover the boat back onto the trailer from the water.









Related posts:

1. How to Tow a Boat Behind a Car Safely, Reverse, Launch and Recover
2. How to be Safe at Sea – IT’S WET
3. How to Reduce Spills When Fueling a Boat

Have you ever thought how strange it is to park your boat out in the open (on a mooring or on a pontoon) with just a rope tying it to the bouy or dock? An expensive and precious item that may cost anywhere from £10,000 to £200,000 is left outside with the best anti-theft properties of a piece of rope. We all lock our cars and houses and have alarms fitted to both in case a chavy yob wants to burn rubber while doughnutting in the car park of DFS or a drug fuelled gang wants to lift our sky plus box or 42″ plasma TV to fuel their habit.

We are a trusting bunch, us sailing types. Friendly and welcoming (unless holding position at a mark when we become loud, aggressive and nasty of course) and love being out on the water with friends and family sharing our passion. Long may that continue I say.

But the reality is that things do go missing. Boats are stolen and other, more easily pinched, items disappear. The auxiliary outboard, the inflatable, the jet ski or the life-raft can all quite easily be stolen. We can chain and padlock the easily movable items. We can put a wheel clamp on the trailer of the jet ski, RIB or dinghy. These might deter a speculative thief so it’s a good idea to do this and be cautious, but anti-theft devices don’t always prevent theft if the thief is determined to get away with your possessions.

Each year in the UK alone, the number of stolen cars, motorcycles, boats, caravans, motor homes, HGV’s and plant machines, exceeds 300,000.

Help is at hand with a very clever device called the M-track. It’s small, completely wireless, lasts several years between battery changes and can be mounted just about anywhere. It’s clever because it works under cover so if your outboard or jet ski is stolen and hidden in a garage or lock up (which is likely) the item can still be found.

There are a couple of types of M-track, and the most advanced (M-track PRO) has multiple types of communication and tracking, including GPS, GSM, GPRS, RF, SMS. M-track PRO is ideal for boats that are kept outside on moorings or in marinas while the standard M-track GSM is perfect for more easily moved and hidden items.

M-Track Device

If you have a device installed on your boat (you can install it easily yourself) it can be located via the mobile phone network with an accurate GPS position and then returned to you. When you buy the device you also take out a service contract and should anything go missing, you ring the call centre and they do everything else. They’ll locate the stolen item and liaise with law enforcement to recover your things. It’s very simple and the manufacturers boast a 98% success rate.

If you want to see that the tracking actually works, check out this news item from SKY News where an M-Track device was used to track a broken TV from a refuse centre in Basingstoke to Nigeria (it was illegally transported and SKY was able to prove it with the M-Track). It really does work! : Click Here.

The standard M-track GSM is £265 and the M-track PRO is £395 on Harbour Exchange or BoatGoblin.com. This is the best price on the web – guaranteed and is for the purchase of the device. The service contract is £130 per year which is provided directly by the monitoring company. Don’t worry about a thing though as Harbour Exchange or BoatGoblin will make sure it’s all smooth sailing.

To read more about M-Track or purchase, you can follow the links below:
M-Track GSM on Harbour Exchange or BoatGoblin.com
M-Track PRO on Harbour Exchange or BoatGoblin.com

PS. There are a few excellent additional benefits to having an M-Track device

1. Lower insurance premiums as the device is Thatcham approved
2. GPS tracking (PRO only) for races and voyages

Related posts:

1. Top 9 Websites to Buy or Sell a Boat
2. 10 Reasons to use BoatGoblin.com

We’ve added a few new tools to Harbour Exchange. These services are embedded into the Harbour Exchange Portal so that sailors can find the best of the web to do with sailing, weather, navigation, tides and other services, really, really easily.

We’ve just added:
XC Weather for UK weather forecasts and winds
WindMapper for US weather forecasts and winds
BoatU.S. member services locator which also features a complete set of charts and online navigation aids for the US coastal waters

The information provided is the property of the publishers of these websites. We hope they are useful.

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Every year in the UK more than 8,000 rescues are made by the RNLI, with more than 50% of these being responses to leisure sailors like us. While many of these are real accidents that no-one could have forseen, a great proportion are rescues or incidents that could have been avoided by better preparation before setting off.

The Lifeboat service is voluntary and the men and women that brave all weathers deserve a little more consideration. Should they really have to launch in truly foul weather, risking their lives, to rescue a yachtsman who didn’t check the weather well enough, or who didn’t have the right equipment on board before setting out? I’d argue that our own families deserve a little consideration too, as do the crew that trust in us as their all knowing skipper on what for them should be a pleasant day out.

The RNLI have a mnemonic for safety at sea: IT’S WET

1. I – Inform. Tell others about where you are going. Make sure others know what your pasage plan is and make sure they know when to raise the alarm if they don’t hear from you. Shortly Harbour Exchange will be launching a service to help sailors do this effectively.
2. T – Training. Think about you and your crew. Do you all have enough knowledge of the plans, how to sail or handle the boat? Would they be able to cope if it got rough or if the skipper got sick or injured? Make sure there are at least a handful of experienced sailors and the longer and more involved the planned journey, the more experience you should have on board.
3. S – SOS Device. What if you got into trouble? Do you have a working VHF with DSC and just as importantly does your crew know how to use it and what the calling protocols are? If you are on a longer passage offshore, do you have an EPIRB, SART or other means of raising the alarm if out of VHF range. It can take minutes for a problem to become a disaster at sea and so having these in easy reach (with a hadheld VHF and personal EPIRBs in the grab bag) and a well briefed crew is essential.
4. W – Wear a lifejacket. It’s so obvious that it’s trite to say it, but a lifejacket can only save a life if it is attached to a living being. Othervise it is just an inflatable bag with straps!! Wear it or drown. I see a lot of people sailing in the Solent with no lifejacket, oblivious to the effect of the cold water should they hit the ‘drink’. To demonstrate the effect, a few years ago some of our Olympic swimmers were tossed in to a cold Solent without lifejackets and they struggled to swim. The cause: the shock of the cold water. If our Olympians struggle, imagine what an overweight, middle-aged, booted and foulweather-geared up crew member would do – and you don’t even need to be submerged to drown – you can drown in the spray you cause trying to stay afloat. Worth thinking about. Wear it!
5. E – Engine and fuel check. Do you have enough fuel for your journey? What if the wind dies and you need to motor all the way? What if you need extra power to get out of danger? Is the oil at the right level and do you have enough spares in case something breaks? Obvious things to ensure you have are spare impellers. If you have ever been thrown around in a rouch sea, you may know that the cooling system could get an airlock and not circulate when you fire up the donkey. Do you and at least one member of the crew know how to prime the system and get it back to life so you don’t ruin the engine or worse still cause a fire?
6. T – Tides and Weather. Check the weather regularly before setting out either online or via radio/TV. The best sources are the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 or the Coatguard’s broadcast following announcements they make on Channel 16. Marinecall.co.uk is also a good source, and if you phone them for a weather update, a portion of the cost of your call supports the RNLI. You can also check out our weather pages on for a range of up to date services. Then there are the tides – make sure you know what these are doing even if you are only day-tripping, as a strong spring tide ebb could make it impossible to get back to your morring if your engine is under-powered. Also a ‘wind with tide’ passage is bound to be much more comfortable for you and your crew than a ‘wind against tide’ passage. Check out some good tide resources on Harbour Exchange.

These are real basis ‘Sailing 101′ tips, but given that more than 4,000 call outs are made to yachties each year it seems like we could all be doing with a refresher.

And the last thing….if you aren’t already a supporter of the RNLI then go to http://www.rnli.org.uk and support them. You hope never to need them but if you do you’ll feel so much better knowing you conributed to their efforts to keep us safe.

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