Fixing Sailboats- How to make a Sailboat Burglar Alarm - Patrick Childress Sailing #10

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for Fixing Sailboats- How to make a Sailboat Burglar Alarm - Patrick Childress Sailing #10

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Anthony Lee - 5 years ago

Is that your attack cat. Keep him hungry while you're away. Let him eat the flesh off an intruders foot instead.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

Haha. Since being a kitten, I have roughhoused with Lilly, as though she were a puppy. Now, she roughhouses with me, and when I least expect it.

Johny Rodriguez - 5 years ago

How long are you typically ashore that you have to totally home alone your boat like that?

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

It depends where in the world you are. Often we just leave the sandals on the side deck, radio on along with a light for an evening out. Or maybe add the 9volt trip alarm. Here in Tanzania, if we are gone over night, we hire a guard to sleep on the boat. Guards were not available in Majuro, Marshall Islands, where we had all the deterrents set.

Juan Luis - 5 years ago

Your ideas are great, but what if trap mouse fires accidentally, say in a gale!, do you have a time out break, or it will just goes off when out of battery?

Juan Luis - 5 years ago

+Patrick Childress Sailing good point and think is a good idea, but it all depends where and who is around. Have you look on new domotic cheap solutions, with relays, smart switches, pir, smoke, water, you name it sensors.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

I can't imagine why, while at anchor, the mouse trap alarm would go off on its own, but if it did, it would get the attention of everyone within a half mile including the friend who knew how to rearm the trap. Otherwise, it would continue to blare till the battery ran out. There is no reason to have a time cut out as that would give every one a false sense that the situation has normalized and needs no further investigation.

Richard Jones - 5 years ago

I am gaining so much valuable information from your videos. I turn 75 in February 2019 and will be starting my cruising adventure this coming spring in a C&C 39. I will restrict myself to coastal sailing until I am well familiar with the boat. I glean all your videos for all the useful info., they contain. Thank you so much Patrick, for all you kindly share with your audience.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

+Richard Jones I will definitely be watching flickr for your nature videos. I am just learning this video thing and have a long way to go...but just put up my first "nature" video about our safari to the interior of Tanzania. It will show on this sailing site plus it is the first post on our new Travels and Animals you tube channel. It seems a way to get double exposure for some very labor intensive productions. Amazing work published on your Flickr site!

Richard Jones - 5 years ago

@Patrick Childress Sailing. I will be sailing from Bras D'or on Cape Breton Island, closest city is Sydney NS. My mooring will be at Seal Island bridge in the NW of Bras D'or. It is very nice to hear back from you, very kind of you. I will be making wild life videos from the local coastline and will publish videos to YouTube and stills to Flickr. Flickr site is https://www.flickr.com/photos/aeros4/ . I hope you will visit and I will surely stay in touch, it will be a great pleasure to do so. Bon vent pour vous deux.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

Richard, Good for you for starting an adventure in the spring. The C&C 39 is a great boat and easy enough to single hand. You have 7 years on me. I have to think back to when I was 19 and working at a custom power boat factory in Miami. The boss and I stayed late to finish off a boat due to delivery to the new owner in the morning. The boss ran out and bought a six pack. When I opened one and started drinking it, he asked "Are you old enough to drink?" I told him, "I never let my age stop me from doing anything." I never expected to use the same line decades later. Please keep in touch. I want to know how your trip progresses. Where are you sailing out of?

Dan McAfee - 5 years ago

Excellent stuff. Love the cat, and especially the alarming info.

cameron Gibbs - 5 years ago

In Australia we have a term called built like a brick shit house .is that how you named your boat

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

That is a similar tern in the U.S.. No. Rebecca was a very good real estate agent, I was in construction and did a lot of home remodeling. We got together and flipped houses to pay our way to go sailing. Plus, there is a 1970s dance song by the Commodores called "She's a Brick House" . We joke that it is our love song....all a long story. This boat used to be called Yellow Rose, a soft name like Petunia. That name had to go.

S/V Tattoo - 5 years ago

I have a thermal detector that turns on the spreader lights at night when I step aboard the stern. It was originally done to make it easier for me to board at night, but could definitely be part of a security system. One of the last things a thief wants is to be lit up while they are sneaking around.

Richard Jones - 5 years ago

+S/V Tattoo Please forgive my tone and misconstruing your post. I can only put my overreaction to stress getting my share of a divorce settlement from my Filipina wife of 25 years, buying a boat , a house and driving from Alberta to Nova Scotia in freezing January.

Paix et bon vent.

S/V Tattoo - 5 years ago

+Richard Jones - My comment, while addressed to you, was more or less a blanket statement to anybody who reads it. My apologies if you felt as if I was lecturing you. It was certainly not my intent.

I understand the type of devices you mentioned, and they are certainly better than some ideas others have presented. As I have mentioned I am not really worried about thieves so I may be a poor judge of what others may feel is necessary. If it happened to me once we may be having an entirely different conversation.

Peace and fair winds.

Richard Jones - 5 years ago

+S/V Tattoo I'm at a loss trying to understand why I need to explain myself to you. The devices described fire blanks, all one needs to do is place them high enough not to course injury and to amplify the sound enough to awaken the entire marina population. In my country, there are laws against setting traps that will course physical injury. One would be charged under the criminal code. In Canada we cannot use firearms to defend ourselves in our own homes. So I hope you understand your lecture was pointless.

S/V Tattoo - 5 years ago

+Richard Jones - I think it is important to find a solution that will keep the thieves at bay while also being harmless to others. Trip wires, exploding things and electrified things will likely kill some poor old soul who is stopping by to invite me for tea. I would rather give my sailboat away than hurt an innocent person. Thankfully I have never had any problems with thieves. I am sure it is because my little beat up sailboat is a tiny uncut emerald in a sea of big shiny diamonds.

Richard Jones - 5 years ago

Such a brilliant idea (pun intended), I'm going to use it. Another thing I've considered is using blank 12 gauge shells in a device that game keepers in the UK used to detect poachers. A trip line attached to a device that will fire the blank shell. One helluva surprise I bet!

S/V Tattoo - 5 years ago

+Patrick Childress Sailing - I don't agree with Duterte's tactics but Davao is certainly much cleaner and safer than most cities in the southern Philippines. There has been a tremendous amount of extrajudicial killing with a lot of innocent victims. Basically if you want to kill somebody here all you need to do is plant a little drugs, and pin a sign to their chest declaring them a drug dealer. It is hard to relax in paradise when human life, including my own, has so little value. I have been so far out of the loop since my boy came to stay with me that I have no idea what anybody is doing anymore.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

+S/V Tattoo I used to ask people living and working in Devao, how they liked the city. They all said they love Devao but it was not always that way. Mayor Dutarte, cleaned up the trash from the streets and made the criminals afraid to commit a crime. I wonder how Charton is doing and if he is ready to sail away. We used to be docked next to Steve and Cauz. We would have been in the thick of it.

S/V Tattoo - 5 years ago

+Patrick Childress Sailing - Looking back through my logs doesn't provide much information, but apparently I bought the sensor at Hobbyking in Davao for 305php (about $5.75usd). It was not waterproof until I encapsulated most of it in epoxy. It is wired up to work very similar to any PIR activated light, and can be bypassed for normal spreader light operation. I have discreetly mounted it in the taffrail, and you would really have to look hard to see it.

I am somewhat lucky in the Philippines because the huge majority of people are honest to a fault. It gets even better in the Philippines as you get away from big cities. Obviously there are bad apples in every basket, but I feel truly blessed to be where I am. We joke about how if someone broke in to our yachts, they would probably clean up and cook us a meal.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

That is a nice idea which I will start looking for the sensor tomorrow. We are in a high theft area here in Tanzania. Even the locals who own nice boats have guards staying on their boats 24/7. It is not like these people are desperadoes, just poor people looking for an easy outboard or line to pinch.

Coleman Adams - 5 years ago

Great ideas for anywhere, here we have some property in the province that is a good target for petty thieves, some of your ideas will work well there....curious is you have ever tried a "hot " wire connected to a good sized marine battery? Gives the thieves a shocking welcome aboard..

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

We all talk about hot wiring the life lines but no one has been able to show me the equipment needed to do it, running off the 12 volt battery bank.

Jonathan Ware - 5 years ago

We have had a few problems with folks messing with our club boat here in the US on an inland lake. I think these little alarms will be perfect. Thanks for the ideas!

10. comment for Fixing Sailboats- How to make a Sailboat Burglar Alarm - Patrick Childress Sailing #10

Lynndon Harnell - 5 years ago

Could always use tacks scattered on the deck a la Joshua Slocum

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

As long as they are stainless steel tacks.

Tim McWilliams - 5 years ago

+Patrick Childress Sailing intersting idea, premier1 supplies has a 12v charger that could electrify it. The key would be the ground wire as the thief needs to be touching both hot and ground at same time.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

I would very much like to electrify our life lines....but so far haven't been able to find a 12 volt electric fence to do the job.

Reload 'n Charge! - 5 years ago

good video and pertinent (for Florida even....). Curious, did you have someone, another cruiser perhaps, come over and reset alarms...or did the wailing continue until 9v batteries died....and did any patient crooks, with sandals scared off them in the first instance, come back aboard knowing you were away and the alarm was a diversion tactic? thanks! Andrew

AREO - 5 years ago

+Reload 'n Charge! agree totally mate, Patrick's vids keep it real, there informative and educational. All those vlogs of guys filming their partners in bikinis drinking cocktails for thumbs up ratings just make me want to jump off a boat not stay on one.

Reload 'n Charge! - 5 years ago

+Patrick Childress Sailing Thanks for the informative response Patrick, and well done. It certainly pays to have cruiser friends nearby willing to keep an eagle eye out.....I had visions of your mega-horn blaring out like a non-stop call to prayer for days, everyone praying the battery died! Will be piecing the components together for a similar system, though my cruising grounds (florida, bahamas, france in May) may not warrant extreme measures. But thanks, and a very fun video to watch! It is hard to go back to viewing so many of the other vlogs after your info-vlogs...drinking, partying, droning, and videoing each other videoing..along with a modicum of sailing can only go on so long!

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

Andrew, We had cruising friends, moored close by, who knew the setup and came over right away in response to the alarm and reset it. I think they lost a couple db of hearing in the process. The thieves did come back two days later and another cruiser just happened to come up topside on his own boat, in the middle of the night, and saw them climbing onto Brick House. That cruiser turned on his own spreader lights and got on Ch16 to wake up other cruisers. The dinghy armada went out in the black of night and only saw some air bubbles from a scuba diver. They got away. Rebecca immediately flew back to Majuro while I finished up business in the U.S.. Since the police and the local U.S. consulate were not concerned about the break-ins, I contacted my senator to put pressure on the lazy officials at the U.S. consulate to put pressure on the local police. The Marshall Islands receives incredible amounts of millions of dollars, of our tax payer money, every year. That did the trick. The police did put out a boat patrol late each night, I checked up on them, and that stopped the break-ins. But Majuro is a small town/village. Everyone in Majuro grew up with each other so a little investigating would have revealed that one of the perpetrators, it was eventually said, was the son of the police chief.

Matt Ray - 5 years ago

This was an awesome video!!! LOved it. Making sure Brian has seen it.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

Thanks for watching!

S/V Outcasts - 5 years ago

It's a shame you had this idea for a video. Wish videos like this never get made, but unfortunately some people suck. Hate thieves. I liked the mouse traps lol.

Patrick Childress Sailing - 5 years ago

Yes, there a a few bad people everywhere but now we know how to protect ourselves. Thanks for watching!

Patrick Childress Sailing - 6 years ago

It took 30 days for the thieves to became accustomed to the scare crows and get brave enough to try to enter Brick House through the main hatch by lifting up the dinghy.

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