Stories

From the well-established Ribquest name comes a boat to fill the traditionalist with joy. Mike Pullen reports.

When the new owners took over at Ribquest in 2008, they did so with a firm plan in mind. They already knew that the hull designs were extremely seaworthy but they wanted to add bombproof build quality to the brand’s list of assets and they wanted to make sure they were recognised for that. As a result, modern Ribquest boats (even their leisure hulls) are now built to commercial standards.

They are not of course the fastest things on the water because of the extra weight they carry, but they are certainly built to withstand years of abuse without showing the slightest strain - and that makes sense. After all, are leisure boaters really that worried about squeezing the last knot out of a design? Probably not. Instead, they want is to make sure their investment is able to repay them with some proper long-term resilience. In the real RIB world more than any other element of leisure boating, that is what proper value for money is all about.

Design features

The design, as well as the build, of the Ribquest is very much along commercial lines. The high prow is not as exaggerated as that of the Delta, but it is sufficiently pronounced for the onlooker to tell at a glance that this is a boat built to take on serious water. Casting your eye down the side of the boat shows a very nicely finished moulding and an attention to detail that is evident throughout. The electrical installations, for instance, are neatly arranged and run through conduits with proper marine fittings. This is the kind of meticulous preparation and rigging that benefits everyone. It pays the boater back with years of reliability and it pays the builder back with far greater freedom from warranty niggles. In short, when things are put together properly, the world is a much better place.

Once on board, the 780 actually seems very spacious and this is down to the fact that she is really an eight-metre boat. You have a choice of layouts for the seating, dependent on what you want the craft for but the standard selection tends to involve four single jockey seats and a three-seater stern bench at the rear.

The jockey seats are Ribquest’s own design and differ from most seats out there in that they use knee scallops and wider bases that taper out to give a substantial footprint on the deck. These jockey seats are securely mounted, using both bonding and stainless bolts to ensure their rigidity and strength and that also ensures that the interior is protected from water on the deck. The glorious stainless steel backrests and grab handles, together with the A-frame, are also designed in-house by a specialist stainless fabricator and the standard of the welds and polishing is very impressive.

The bow area has a raised step with a dedicated chain locker and a fairlead over the bow for leading the anchor warp through a protective rubber shroud. To augment the stowage, there is a full-width locker within the stern bench and more stowage within the console. On this particular boat that console space houses the battery and the fuel filters but, if called upon to do so, it will easily swallow several large drybags.

For more details, see the April 2010 issue of Sports Boat and RIB Magazine. Subscribe HERE

The Stingher 10m has one horsepower for every 1.4 cm of its considerable length. If a six-foot man were so blessed, he would possess no fewer than 260hp. Nice thought. Alex Smith reports.

I remember travelling to Plymouth to carry out a mid-winter review of an open boat. At nine in the morning, it sat at the pontoon, cloaked in a bedrock of frost. Not once did the needle lift above zero that day and, as we soldiered on with dampened faces at far too many knots for comfort, I felt my skin burning with the cold. I still recall how my face took on a strawberry sunbed complexion and my lips, pillaged of moisture and cut through by the wind, shrivelled up like strips of ageing beef.

So when Ed Pedley, Director of MRL, called me up with a mid-winter invitation to test an open ten-metre RIB, I anticipated pain. And when he told me that all 700 of its horsepower were conjured into being by a pair of Verado’s flagship 350Sci supercharged outboard engines, rigged with painstaking care and tested to the most perfect expression of their potency by none other than seven-times world champion, Neil Holmes, I knew it was going to be monumentally rapid. But this time I was prepared. With a quart of Factor 30 massaged into my face and lips swimming in virgin seal fat, I made my way down to Drivers Wharf to take a look . . .

Sitting on the dock

Notwithstanding the promise of the prodigious Mercury twin rig, the ten-metre Stingher is actually a rather unassuming boat to look at. You get a broad, open deck with a two-man console in the middle, plus a long, elevated bow space with plenty of potential for sun bathing, storage and communal entertaining. In the forward-most V of the bow, the level is raised further to accommodate the anchor locker and topped off at the peak with a hard nose at the apex of the large-diameter tubes.

It’s worth noting however that, even with a fat, traditional, workmanlike collar, the internal beam measures more than seven feet at its widest point. That’s enormous for a ten-metre RIB and although the need for a relatively fine entry means that this width cannot be carried very far forward, it does create a great deal more room than the average ribster would expect.

Singing in tune

By European standards, 700 horsepower on a ten-metre leisure boat seems like a hell of a lot. And given the fact that there is no cabin to add a little extra weight and dumb down the nose, it seems even more excessive. But when you get underway, it doesn’t feel in the slightest bit overpowered and that has a great deal to do with the tuning process.

For more, see the March 2010 issue of Sports Boat and RIB magazine . . .

Once upon a time, we all grew immensely excited by a touchscreen interface from Apple so marvellously slick, we all felt like the intrepid pioneers of a brave new future. We had done away with the antiquainted dinosaur that was the button and left it on the scrap-heap of ancestral embarrassments alongside the video cassette, the rental television and the twin tub. With this new wizardry in our hands, we could scroll through our juke boxes, orchestrate our social lives and surf the net with nothing more than the brush of a fingertip. It was inevitable that the world of marine electronics would set about following suit.

Trouble is, the first incarnations of marine touchscreen were fundamentally disappointing. The need for robust, waterproof, impact-resistant, high-visibility screens meant they felt clumsy and backward in operation compared to the slick iPhones we had all come to love. Sluggish update speeds would also tend to leave us wondering where we were for five seconds or so, every time the screen attempted to scroll onto a fresh area of chart.

But now, at last, we have something that shows us how useful marine touchscreen can be. The new Garmin GPS Map750 touchscreen-controlled standalone marine chartplotter comes with radar capability and (in the case of the 750s) built-in sonar. It also comes with a seven-inch screen, plus pre-loaded UK and Ireland charts, including Northern France and the Belgian coast. And not only do you get the joy of a large, responsive touchscreen interface, but the split-screen viewing capability also allows you to exploit the data input from your engine instruments or sonar.

The GPSMAP 750 also features a standard radar port that lets you connect with any Garmin GMR series marine radar for target scanning on your chartplotter screen. And the convenience of this ‘plug-and-play’ potential means the cost-conscious mariner can take advantage of radar capabilities, without incurring the network price. In addition, these new units offer full NMEA 2000 connectivity, making it easy to monitor engine, fuel, autopilot and other onboard data via the plotter screen.

The screen itself is waterproof to IPX7, with extreme brightness for daytime readability and a super low-level dimming mechanism (as low as 0.5 Nit) for optimum night vision. And there are upgrade paths too, as the new plotters can be loaded with an optional BlueChart g2 Vision SD card, allowing you to navigate with a ‘moving-map’ representation of the boat’s position. The card also allows you to employ the Auto-Guidance feature, which suggests the best routes to follow and, if your vessel is fitted with a Garmin pilot, you can then instigate the pilot control to follow the Auto-Guidance route direct from the plotter screen.

Are there any downsides? Well a regular push-button equivalent could be yours for less money and the unit draws lots of energy to drive its powerful processor. The screen also runs quite hot during prolonged use but for most of us, that is likely to be a blessing rather than a curse.

Nigel Craine, Marine product Manager for Garmin, is fully aware how profound the impact of the new product could be: “Our touchscreen technology is recognised throughout the industry for its performance and ease of use. These chartplotters offer a whole new perspective on fingertip navigation and bridge the gap between the entry-level boater and the luxury yacht customer.”

The GPSMAP 750 is priced at £1,199.99 and the GPSMAP 750s (with built-in 1kW-capable sonar transceiver) is just £100 more. Available in April 2010, the new 750 range represents ample proof that our faith in touchscreen plotters was justified after all...

www.garmin.co.uk

With the emergence of the new Cobra 8.0, the epic Yamaha F350 adds another willing transom to the club. Mike Pullen gets predictably excited . . .

From the moment it was introduced, the Yamaha V8 350hp outboard has caused a surge throughout the industry. In America the tournament fishing boats were strengthened to accept a quadruple rig of these behemoths and back here, in Europe, there have been boats designed and built specifically around this landmark engine. Back in August 2009, for instance, we saw the epic Yamarin 74C built by the very capable Norwegian boatyard for that very purpose and now, with the development of the new Cobra eight-metre RIB, we in the UK have a 350-platform to call our very own.

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