quirkster wrote:
Matt, Matt, Matt, I am normally the first one to defend Hobie but I have to call a big Bullsh*&t to your last post. First off my forward hatch was not awash but a few times this past weekend. It never submarined. Second I know the middle hatch was leaking like a sieve because I had a canvas bag under it resting on a plastic piece of tupperware far above any water and it was soaked from the top down. The water is not leaking around the edges of the hatch but through the twist a seal "cylinder". Besides that anytime you open this poorly designed lid in wet conditions you dump at least an ounce on water into the hull. We had far more water tight hatches on Hobie 18s in the early 80s. You guys need to leave theoretical land and actually get out in the field where the rest of us live. Time to pull your heads out of the sand and smell the sea water.
Come on Chekika....and from someone who contributes so many interesting and helpful posts. I am by no means an appologist for Hobiecat
but I think you are a bit over the mark
I probably havent been out in the seas you have experienced but fishing in tidelines here sometimes running against a moderate breeze in swells nearly overhead from my sitting position (say 3') close hauled (thinking how dumb I am not to be somehow attached to the boat) and crashing thru all this stuff close hauled like a sledge I have returned to the beach suprised to find very little water in the hull. Your driving a hull designed to move through the water at lets say 4 knots probably close to double that under sail and i think its doing pretty well. Its a hybrid craft, a swiss army knife of a boat as someone here once described it.
Thank GOD for a hatch that you can open one handed with the turn of a handle, the times I have had to reach in to grab something Fast or to post a recalcitrant fish into the bilge and I have had only one hand free. I would hate to have to deal with a screw down hatch.
I am on my second AI, the first did let a little more water in than the second, the seal did twist but then I just took it off and straightened it out.
So maybe with great respect time to take our heads out of the sea and take a look at what we have here...a boat thats taken you on all those trips, the constant revisions being made to it, those revisions largely made as a result of constructive criticism.
Good to hear you were sailing an 18 in the 80's, werent they fun? I rarely had to open the hatches at sea on mine, they were screw down. I would HATE to have to deal with the same kind of hatch on the AI.
Best regards,
Philip