Thread: Do you raft?
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Old 12-28-2012, 02:32 AM   #2
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
We raft frequently to Happy Destiny, Carey's 36' lobsterboat, when we go out together. We have also rafted to a 30' Newport sloop on several of our longer cruises up north in BC.

The yacht club we belong to has a cruise every Labor Day to Garrison Bay on San Juan Island. This is always in the form of a large raft, sometimes over 20 boats. I think the most we've had is 27. We often go on this cruise as it serves as a good jumping off point for our longer cruises into BC in September.

Fortunately one of the long-time members of the yacht club is an extremely experienced cruiser and anchorer and he takes charge of setting up the raft. This year's cruise had about ten boats and the wind blew upwards of 20 knots the first day. Our resident anchoring expert had the anchors places so that no matter which way the wind veered we stayed put.

The photos below are of us rafted to Happy Destiny (in this case on a dock instead of a buoy or anchor), La Mouette, and the club raft from several years ago.

The photo of us and Happy Destiny is quite old, probably from the mid- 2000s as we still have our old Bruce anchor. We don't get to cruise with Carey and his wife as much these days as Carey is often away working disasters for FEMA.

Neither our boat nor Happy Destiny were in the club raft depicted below which I copied from the club's website.

Neither we nor the boats we have rafted to have ever experienced any damage even when the wind kicked up and the water got rough. However we and Happy Destiny carry several very large fenders in addition to our regular fenders for just this situation.
Attached Thumbnails
La Perouse 3.jpg   Prideaux 1.jpg   SYC Raft.jpg  
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