Show Some Love For Our Boats

We're only a few weeks into our peak practice schedule where we have 8 boats in the water and we're already having some serious issues challenging the maintenance schedule for our boats. If we are going to continue to have enough boats in the water for teams to use, we need EVERYONE to take better care of our boats and to report maintenance issues to board@dragonsports.org immediately.​ Failure to do so is a violation of the Team Rental Terms.

While we recommend that everyone review all of the Team Rental Terms as well as our Safety Rules & Guidelines, we wanted to highlight two issues that have surfaced in the past week.

Properly parking, locking, and tying up the boats

When you return to the dock, please remember to put the boat fenders out before reaching the dock and then approach the dock slowly and carefully. Please refer to the diagram below for proper boat parking (yes, this is a 6-boat diagram, the other two go to the left when we have 8 in the water). 

Once you've got that maneuver down, don’t forget to tie up the boats properly to dock cleats using a cleat hitch (no more than one per cleat), like this:

NOT this:

Please also be sure to lock the boats when you are done, unless another team is on the dock and waiting to take your boat out (same goes for the lockers). If a lock is broken or missing, please email board@dragonsports.org immediately.

Broken till mounts​

This one is for the tillers, and we know you've heard this before, but another till mount was broken last week.

As far as we know, there are really only two causes (other than normal wear and tear) for the breakage: 1) hitting another object, or 2) backing up the boat and leaving the till in the water.

In the photo above, the till bracket on the right is pretty severely bent. This has all the hallmarks of a tiller backing up the boat and trying to use the till as a rudder, rather than using sweeps, to correct the boat’s course. It’s very easy to lose control of the till in this situation. Typically one of two things will happen: 1) the till blade will be caught by the water and swept away from the boat, twisting the till bracket and putting quite a bit of stress on the till, along with potentially pushing the tiller out of the boat; or 2) the till will be caught by the water and swept downward, pushing the top of the till bracket backward until it bends, or the till mount breaks, or both.

The till bracket on the left in the photo isn’t bent, which would indicate that the breakage in this case was more likely from a direct impact, rather than till-induced.

If a till mount is broken or if there are any other issues with the till (we also heard a rope wrapped on a till came undone this past week), please email board@dragonsports.org immediately.