3 UK BOATING HOT SPOTS
The Royal Yachting Association has published a ‘heat map’ of the UK’S leisure boating activity. The chart shows the most popular boating hot spots and passages around our shores, with the busiest places showing up red, followed by orange, yellow, green and blue. As expected the south coast looks to be the busiest area with other hot spots around the Channel Islands, east coasts of Ireland and the UK, and the west coast of Scotland
The RYA has been collating this information since 2004, creating a UK Coastal Atlas of Recreational Boating. However, the latest edition uses information gathered via Automatic Identification System (AIS) data up to
September 2019. The RYA says this offers ‘a more accurate real-time indication of popular boating areas’.
The idea is to gain a better picture of the areas most utilised for general boating, racing and passage-making, as well as for the distribution of clubs, training centres and marinas. It is also used by government, local authorities, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and renewable energy developers to help inform planning and legislation that might affect boat owners.
While this gives a good idea of passages made by craft fitted with
AIS transponders, it’s not perfect. Many smaller boats are not fitted with AIS systems, a point acknowledged by Phil Horton, RYA Environment and Sustainability Manager.
“The updated AIS data provides increasingly good coverage of the UK’S coastal waters and beyond, however we are aware there are some data gaps, particularly in estuaries. We recognise this does not mean no recreational craft visit the area. For this reason we also provide further data supplied by RYA clubs and other sources, utilising, in particular, the 2015 RYA club survey data.”