The Frank LomBiondo Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2018 was signed by President Trump back on 4 December 2018 per Issue 92/Spring 2019 of the U.S. Coast Guard Boating Safety Circular.
The bill appropriates money for Coast Guard expenses in Fiscal Year 2019, as well as includes a few specific regulations.
Attwood Marine Products universal (7 key) boat lanyard / kill cord
Executive Petty Officer Terrell Horne
boarding the Halibut after water survival training
USCG photo
USCG named the 31st fast response cutter, a 154 footer after him, the Terrell Horne (WPC-1131) per the 20 March 2019 Modesto Bee and other references. A film of the cutter arriving at Los Angeles – Long Beach Coast Guard Base in San Pedro January 2019 is below. Read More →
Congratulations to Ott Defoe on his great Bassmaster Classic win Sunday 17 March 2019.
We screen captured the image of him and his family below as they began the parade around the arena from Bassmaster’s live coverage.
Ott Defoe & family in 2019 Bassmaster Classic after his win
Bassmaster image
Congratulations to Nitro to putting their boat in the winners circle and to Mercury Marine for powering this year’s winner.
Ott Defoe in Nitro livewell for his final bag of the 2019 Bassmaster Classic, Knoxville Tennessee
Bassmaster image
Thanks to all who participated in this great event, anglers, friends, family, fans, and the city of Knoxville Tennessee for providing great facilities and for turning out in record numbers (we heard 153,000 over the weekend).
Mock race between outboard motor manufacturers. Mercury posted on Instagram from the Knoxville Tennessee 2019 Bassmaster Classic
We clipped the great photo below from The Leash’s Facebook feed.
Ott Defoe & family clip from The Leash’s Facebook feed as he won the 2019 Bassmaster Classic.
Our Log strike impact mapping / charting invention disclosure below was posted on 2 March 2019. We will make no changes to the text below the line following this paragraph except to correct misspellings, punctuation, and to update html/computer codes and links. Any updates to the invention will be posted below the invention disclosure.
Log Strike – use of the phrase “log strike” in this invention refers to a marine drive (outboard motor, stern drive, inboard, though hull drive / pod drive, of other marine drive) striking anything while going in a forward direction. Objects struck could include logs, rocks, driftwood, dredge pipes, reefs, concrete, floating debris, submerged objects, stumps, etc. Japanese marine drive manufacturers tend to refer to these impacts as driftwood strikes.
This invention proposes using technologies similar to those already patented by Suzuki and Brunswick to record log strikes, share that data anonymously, then create crowd sourced maps/ charts of the aggregated impacts. These crowd sourced maps could be printed paper maps as well as displayed on onboard navigational displays or other electronic devices. Read More →
Brunswick / Mercury Marine was issued U.S. Patent 10,214,271 Systems and Methods for Monitoring Underwater Impacts to Marine Propulsion Devices on 26 February 2019. Steven J. Gonring and Mark D. Curtis are listed as the inventors.
The patent teaches detecting rate of trim (rate of tilt) to determine an impact occurred. If the drive is tilting more rapidly than normal, it may have struck something. Brunswick talks about alerting the operator, turning the drive off during severe impacts, estimating the force of impact from changes in the rate of trim, storing the resulting data, and evaluating the remaining useful life of the drive or signaling the outboard should be serviced. This system is designed to report impacts above a given level. It does not address impacts that break the outboard off the boat, except to suggest that several impacts above a given level could make an outboard more likely to fail in future impacts.
Near the bottom of this post we identify a Suzuki patent in Japan that may create some prior art issues for Brunswick’s / Mercury Marine’s recent patent.
Brunswick log strike monitoring patent – cover page
In our continuing coverage of large outboard motors breaking off and flipping into boats it is obvious that most incidents in recent years involve bass boats.
Some reasons are obvious: bass boats run fast, bass anglers are in a hurry in bass tournaments, and bass hang out in shallow water. However this paper digs much deeper into the issues.
It suggests the convergence of the bass tournament industry, the conditions present in bass tournaments, and boat & outboard motor manufacturers that created modern bass tournaments had the unintended consequence of bringing together conditions necessary for large outboard motors to strike submerged objects, break off, and flip into boats.
Note: this paper is about 5 MB in size and best viewed on a tablet or desktop computer.
click icon above to view latest pdf version of paper
Note paper is about 5 MB in size
Boat Propeller
The authors provide medical histories of the four individuals injured including color photos of their injuries, how they were treated by paramedics, what happened initially at the hospital, follow up operations, rehabilitation, psychiatric work with them, and numerical evaluations of the percent of recovery they were eventually able to achieve in terms of pain, other symptoms, function in daily living, function in sport/recreation, and quality of life related to their specific injured joints.
In addition, the authors constructed a summary of similar case studies from approximately 20 separate journal articles. The summary includes counts by author on the number of individuals, number of individuals by sex, mean age, activity during which injury occurred (waterskiing, swimming/diving, other), and the number of individuals that fell off and were ran over.
Motorboat Propeller Injuries: A Case Series and Review of the Literature
by: F. Hoexum, E.A.K. Van Delft, G. Van Couwelaar, A.F.W. Van Der Steeg, C.W. Ang, L.G.M. Geeraedts Jr, F.W. Bloemers, and J. Deunk.
Trauma Monthly
July 2017. Vol.22. No.4.
We strongly recommend this article as a good place for medical professionals to start a study of this field, in part because of the extensive bibliography provided. While we did already have all the pure propeller injury studies they cite on our Propeller Safety Bibliography, it will be useful to medical professionals to have these studies on a more manageable list. With no pure propeller studies on their list that were not already listed in our Propeller Safety Bibliography, we suspect they used it to identify at some of these studies. We are always glad to assist such works.
Thanks to the authors and the several facilities involved in putting all this together.
15 June 2022 Update – an overview and bibliography of medical articles on treating watercraft wounds, including water borne marine infections:
18 December 2021 update – nice article:
Watercraft propellers as a mechanism of orthopaedic injuries: injury patterns, management, and complications. Rizzo, Desai, Benson, Viella, & Dodds. European Journal of Trauma and emergency Surgery. Published 28 September 2021. Springer.
8 August 2019 Update – if you have a boat propeller foot or ankle injury or challenges with all the accompanying infections you may find this article helpful as well:
11 October 2023 update
A brief review of the major propeller safety events in 2018 including safety meetings, accidents, legal cases, deaths of those involved in the movement, statistics, patents, articles published, public service announcements, anniversaries, regulations, and other related events. Read More →
Back in June 2018 Suffolk County, New York voted to require propeller guards on boats used for youth instruction. The law was named for 12 year-old Ryan Weiss, killed by a boat propeller at Long Island’s Centerport Yacht Club in July 2017. Ryan was killed during a training exercise on righting a capsized sailboat.
Now, in January 2019, with the boating season a few months off Ryan’s family (Kellie & Kevin Weiss) have teamed with newly elected New York State Senator, Jim Gaughran, to introduce a similar bill statewide.
The Weiss family hopes the bill can be passed before this year’s boating season gets underway per WABC-TV ABC channel 7.
The Weiss family and Senator Gaughran speak on Ryan and Ryan’s Law in the WLNY CBS New York video below.
The New York Times published an epic article on bass tournaments titled, This is the Most Lucrative Moment in History to Catch Bass, on 18 October 2018. The feature article talks extensively about the history and business of bass fishing, The Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (BASS), a Bassmaster Elite tournament at Waddington, New York in August 2018, and the recent formation of a new tournament series, the Bass Pro Tour, under the Major Fishing League (MFL).
When the article was written in October 2018, about 70 BASS association pro anglers had moved over from BASS to MFL’s Bass Pro Tour with its “total payout approaching $10 million.”
Among the major names defecting to the new tour are Kevin VanDam, thought by many to be the greatest bass fisherman ever, Edwin Evers, Skeet Reese, Alton Jones, and Brandon Palaniuk. The article says a total of about 70 pros had defected at that time. Since then, MLF’s web site lists several well known anglers joining their ranks including Tommy Biffle, Gary Clouse, Greg Hackney, Randy Howell, Mike Iaconelli, Chris Lane, Bobby Lane, Dean Rojas,
The article notes the sport of bass fishing has exploded at the high school and college levels. Over a hundred additional college clubs affiliated with BASS since 2012. Several colleges now offer bass fishing scholarships.
The author says many they spoke with anticipate rough times ahead for the BASS organization, but they expect BASS to pull though due to its grass roots presence and half a million members.
With another major organization for pro anglers, more serious anglers will likely be considering trying to enter the pro ranks.
We suspect this article will be cited for decades into the future as a major turning point in bass tournament fishing at the elite level. We hope both organizations take this opportunity to make sure their anglers are safe on the water and the integrity of the sport continues.