Time to recycle old boats?

The ever-growing number of moored pleasure craft reaching their use-by date is reaching epidemic proportions. What’s to be done with them?

Excluding trailerable boats and dinghies, more than 7,000 moored yachts and launches were built in New Zealand between 1960 and 1987. While amateurs built a fair number, this 27-year period was the golden era of production boatbuilding in this country.

No one disputes this fleet has served its owners well, but no permanently moored boat lasts forever. All boats eventually reach a stage where they require such extensive restoration that it’s cheaper to buy new. Let’s call this point of a boat’s life its Realistic Economic Lifespan (REL). For most moored pleasure boats, the REL is somewhere between 25 and 40 years of age.

SAFETY

Skippers of pleasure craft are obliged to comply with much of the 1994 Maritime Transport Act. For example, Section 65 of the Act states it’s an offence to operate, maintain, or carry out any

other act involving any vessel or maritime product that creates an unnecessary risk or danger to persons or property. Operating an unseaworthy boat would breach Section 65.

Unfortunately penalties for seaworthy non-compliance of pleasure craft are applied only after an incident. Apart from the various racing and offshore inspections, currently there’s no process to ensure moored pleasure craft are safe and seaworthy prior to use.

Compare this to the process for vehicles used on public roads. These are legally required to be identifiable (number plates), updated annually (registration) and subject to regular safety inspections ( WOF). To ensure compliance, there’s an active policing and penalty system.

Unless racing or going offshore, pleasure craft escape inspections and their seaworthiness is left to the skipper to decide. While most skippers are conscientious, some aren’t, while others may lack the skills to establish their boat’s seaworthiness.

To be fair, measured by lives lost at sea and Coastguard callouts, the lack of regulatory controls for pleasure craft and their skippers hasn’t been a major safety issue to date. However with an