Gourock Moorings

[mm5aho]

Passing by there today I noticed the first boat to be on the moorings...




No idea who this is out so early in the season, nearly beating me to the water!

[mm5aho]

If you look carefully, can just make out a name on the lifering!

[ash]

Bluddy racers!! They've always got to be first.

Ash

[Fingal]

He clearly has nothing better to do with his time than mend his boat.

[marisca]

One wee drawback of being first on the moorings is the absence of other boats for the birds to crap on. Don't know what variety of visitors I have had but their deposits are relatively small but plentiful and they have been eating something pink. Now there are another 3 boats on the moorings so I hope their attention is drawn elsewhere.
Usually I have no problem with bird droppings whatsoever at Ashton.

[marisca]

Caught the wee annoying people trying to land today. About 20 turnstones in a coordinated squadron wheeled around the boat this evening then aimed straight at Marisca undercarriage and flaps down. I discouraged them by shouting then the wee pests circled the anchorage and tried again. They finally gave up and went to another boat. Some latecomers tried a wee bit later.
Any ideas, apart from a shotgun, to get rid of them.

[mm5aho]

I've see 2 things, 1 effective the other unknown.
One is a small windmill that turns on a vertical axis with long arms and tiny blades on ends, slow turning sweeps them off their feet, but had to site on a yacht. And they're bright enough like crows to land just beyond.
The other is unwanted CDs strung up to flap in the breeze like mirrors. Not sure how well that works, but there a few to be seen.

I have heard on another method, not to be recommended, as its pretty cruel. Seen on an oil rig in north sea.

Mix a dough of flour baking soda and milk. Use about 30% baking soda to 70% flour. sprinkle bits of the dough about.
Only works with marine birds, especially seagulls. The strong acid in their stomach reacts to produce excessive gas in the stomach. In the worst cases (most gluttonous birds) they fly away like a primed bomb, to plummet to a gory death caused by rupture.
Some humans come close to this behaviour without the gas!

[marisca]

According to my bird book turnstones are faithful to their high water and presumably night time roosting places. I think a web of cotton thread over the decks is my next plan. If I can persuade them that someone else's boat is preferable then perhaps they will be "faithful" to it instead.
Moral: don't be a smartarsse and be first boat in the anchorage!

[Fingal]

Unusually, I sympathise with Marisca's bird problem. We have a large Wagtail population at Dallens Bay which roost under the sprayhood and inside the mainsail cover. It's now more or less routine to have to scrub the bridgedeck on arrival at the boat.

A couple of years ago we even found some nests in the back of cockpit lockerswhen the boat had been unused for a couple of weeks in June. I think the only really effective soluition is to go and live on your boat permanently.

[marisca]

I trust you are aware that disturbing nesting birds is a criminal offence and that august organisation, the RSPB, tend to come down heavily on malefactors. Some years ago I caught (visually not actually) a sparrow taking twigs into my exhaust pipe at Port Edgar. The RSPB stricture was to leave it and the boat alone until any offspring had fledged! Unfortunately someone started the engine and blew its efforts out with a spray of black cooling water before I could quarantine the boat.

[mm5aho]

One year, in Dunstaffnage, on arrival and getting ready for sea, I opened the stern cockpit locker. This locker was originally designed to be a liferaft locker on a Rival, but now has a lid on Contender. It opens to the cockpit through a hole where the tiller emerges, so is actually always open even with the lid down.

A raucous squacking quacking noise accompanied the duck flying out, and in the disturbance I fell backward into the cockpit, dropping the locker lid, smashing the egg, and catching the poor duck's foot. Even louder quacking as I picked myself up among the feathers, and flapping duck, both of us now in the cockpit at strange angles.

Ducks nests don't smell nice! There was another egg there, rotten, and the new one now broken, and all manner of mess. You couldn't call it a nest, but there was a lot of stuff in there, now everywhere.

Neither of us benefitted from this unfortunate encounter, but an onlooking adjacent boat owner also fell over - laughing!

[SteveN]

Used to have bird trouble when we were ashore refitting Isabella at Ardrossan; of a summer evening the flocks of starlings would roost on the shed roofs and on the rigging of yachts on the hard. Quite a spectacle but noisy and messy.

At Creran I've had wasps nesting in the cockpit coaming and bats in the exhaust!