What's New on the Site

It is easy to find the latest posts on this forum:
Make sure you are at the top level of the forum (Click the SeaHawk Forum link) then click on the TOPICS VIEW link you see there. (This displays a list of topics, showing the area in which they are posted, sorted to show the most recent topic or reply at the top.)

To receive emails announcing changes to other parts of the site:
Click on OPTIONS at the head of this post and then SUBSCRIBE VIA EMAIL. Messages announcing changes to the rest of the site will be posted here as replies. On subscribing, you will receive an email as each change is announced. To stop these messages coming, simply return to OPTIONS and click the link in the YOUR SUBSCRIPTION SEAHAWK FORUM (EDIT) option.

On the For Sale page, the boat lying in Gloucestershire has been sold and removed from the page.

Additionally, I've discovered:
http://www.youtube.com/user/foleybrown?ob=5#g/u
which includes a number of videos taken from "Feckless", SeaHawk #25 (That seems to be the sail number judging from photos taken by a previous owner when she was known as "Topcat").

I am trying to work out the best way to incorporate these videos on the site. Most probably I'll add a new page for videos of, or clearly taken from, SeaHawks in the Gallery section of the site.

I've finally started work on a major re-build of the site.

The plan is to create a new menu system that will make it easier for our three main groups of visitors "Buyers", "Owners", and "Sellers" to find the pages that are relevant to their needs.

Ease of access to information should be further enhanced by having a Search Box available on every page. A new search provider is being used that will also better index the site, so finding the information you're seeking should be much improved.

Today a new area, My Boat, has been added to the Forum. Registered Members are encouraged to create a folder (sub-forum) within this area and name it after their boat. They will then be able to post photographs, cruise logs, or anything else about their boat in their own personal area of the forum. It is planned to close the current "Cruise Logs" area. Those with posts there are being asked to create an area within "My Boat" so their posts may be preserved.

I'm also hoping to add a fair bit of new material that I realise has been accumulating over the last couple of years. (My fault! I've been spending too much time on my Boating Biography recently!)

While this work is being undertaken, some aspects of the appearance of the site may not be as intended, as changes required for the revised site are tested. Please bear with me while the work is undertaken.

Further work has been done on the Forum.

The areas have been re-ordered, to bring Forum Issues closer to Forum Announcements and FAQs.

A new message explaining Registering, Membership and Posting Rights has been posted. Apart from explaining registration and membership, this new FAQ also explains the extra facilities available to those creating their own "mini forum" within the My Boat area.

The old "Cruise Logs" area has been removed. All those with posts in that area have been contacted. It is hoped those posts will soon re-appear in new "My Boat" mini-forums.

Today I have completed the main part of the promised site re-build.

The most important part of this is the new, six button horizontal main menu. This is radically different from the previous menus as it attempts to direct the three main classes of visitor, BUYERS, OWNERS and SELLERS, to the parts of the site that will interest them. Most of these main menu buttons have a sub-menu associated with them, so very few pages on the site require more than three clicks to reach them, regardless of where you are at the time.

In addition, the top-level menu includes a SEARCH SITE facility on every page. This comes from a new search provider and should reliably find any content on the site. Note that a separate search facility is available for posts made on the FORUM.

Material from the old version of the site has been rearranged. Now the two most common questions from people visiting the site for the first time ("What should I look out for when viewing a boat?" and "How old is a boat?") have dedicated pages, ISSUES and DATING, accessed from the top-level BUYERS menu button.

The most important additional information gleaned over the last two years has been added to the site. New early sales literature has been obtained. Put together with other information acquired over the last two years, the brochure reveals that early Reedcraft SeaHawks were significantly different to later ones. (The first clues was the discovery that early SeaHawks have exposed concrete ballast). This has led to a reassessment of how to date a SeaHawk - as well as revealing a need to discover more about sail plans.

All this, and further material about Pyecraft boats the destcruction of the superstructure mould tools, has required very significant re-write of the "Description", "History" and "Marketing" sections of the site. Again, all this information is accessed via the BUYERS menu button, as it is assumed that any buyer would want to find out about the boat he is interested in before committing to a purchase.

The OWNERS menu button accesses all the material that used to be under the "Boat Shed" menu option. There is some new material here and many minor changes (partly because some of the material that was in the Boat Shed section has been moved to the new "Issues" and "Dating" pages).

A start has also been made in re-configuring the site so it works well on larger screens (Viewing on Smartphone screens shouldn't be compromised), with larger "Image of the Day" pictures on the home page. The images have also had a make-over, so expect to see new ones when you visit.

There should be more new content to come over the next month, as I work through more material accumulated over the last couple of years. It's been a regret that I haven't been doing much more than maintain the "For Sale" page in this period. Now only the Forum's "For Sale" page remains as I am relying on sellers doing the work for themselves in future, so I can concentrate on other parts of the site.

Hello,

Earlier this month I said...

GregSeaHawk wrote

Today I have completed the main part of the promised site re-build.
...
There should be more new content to come over the next month, as I work through more material accumulated over the last couple of years.

And now a further chunk of material has been uploaded.

At the last update I had managed to establish that #126 had exposed ballast and #154 had the new-style encapsulated ballast. Going through some old emails, I realise that the boat Feckless, #146, has exposed ballast, so we are closer to knowing when the new heavier enclosed ballast started to be fitted to SeaHawks. This information is now mentioned on a number of pages.

I recently realised that I didn't have a typical weight of a SeaHawk and trailer recorded on the site. A figure is now given in the "The Boat > Full Description" section on the Hull page.

In the Owners section there are now two Cabin Door variations shown and a page on how owners use both long and short tillers. At last, a Rudders page has been added, reporting on a lifting keel and a deeper fixed rudder. This latter page includes our first YouTube videos. The Hull Insignia page now has information about applying vinyl lettering and news of what I hope will become the Definitive SeaHawk Logo. (You may notice the subtle change in the background image on every page.)

There's been a number of images moved to a photo hosting site, to help reduce the space used in the free web space used at my ISP to host the main site. This should mean that the site can continue to grow in content without having to change its URL.

The result of all this may mean that there are some problems. However, the issue with the missing "Image of the Day" is not one of these. The host is reporting:

================================
Customer CGI and MySQL services (69237) - UPDATE

22/11/2011 @ 20:26

This is an update to the Planned Maintenance post regarding the move of these servers between data centre suites. You can see the original post here: http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1321636601.htm

Unfortunately these services are still offline and are engineers are continuing to work on bringing them back into service. We'll get these back online as soon as possible but are unable to commit to a timescale at the moment.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Chris Parr
Customer Support
================================

I plan to revise the Trailers page in my next update. However, while you wait for that I am hoping that a lot of you will spend the winter months pulling together some photographs of your exploits last summer, and creating your own folder in the "My Boat" area of the forum.

Happy SeaHawking!

Hello,

At my last update report I said:

GregSeaHawk wrote

I plan to revise the Trailers page in my next update. However, while you wait for that I am hoping that a lot of you will spend the winter months pulling together some photographs of your exploits last summer, and creating your own folder in the "My Boat" area of the forum.

It's a shame that my hope went unfulfilled and no one has posted information in the "My Boat" section of the site. Also, I confess that I still haven't started work on the Trailers page. I was hoping that I would get some further pictures of trailers submitted by owners to help me with that page. Where are you "Oz"?

However, last week I was invited aboard a Pyecraft boat and was able to take a few pictures. As a result I have started what might turn into a significant update to the site. So far I have only worked on the Construction and Keel pages in the Buyers section of the site, but there will be more changes coming. The work is taking a longer time than usual as I am taking the opportunity to increase the size of the images on the page as I revise it. The project has led to a significant re-write of both pages, so do take a look.

The results from the search box found on the main menu of every page, and from the Advanced Search form, now include all but the most recent entries posted on the forum. This should make it even easier to find the information you want.

Following my History Puzzle post I have now updated the main part of the site, altering all references throughout the site to 1977 where previously it was recorded that Moores started building the SeaHawk 1979.

At the same time I have uploaded images and commentaries on the new documents now available:
1977 Price List
1984 Price List
1980(?) Special Offers

The main History Page also now defines the Crossover Boat that Moores built in its early days of manufacture.

A further page has been added that describes the Reedcraft document Instructions for Rigging Your SeaHawk.

A link to this new page appears on the main Rigging page.

The SeaHawk site has a new address. Please update your bookmarks/favourites or other links to the SeaHawk site to:

https://www.seahawk17.org.uk/

The old site, hosted at PlusNet, is no longer being updated will show a re-direct for the next month or so before going dead.

You may notice that the site at the new location has a different site search provider. This was forced on us as the one on the PlusNet site ceased operating at the end of March 2013.

In moving the site a number of broken links have been found and updated.

As usual, further updates made to the site will be reported at in the What's New on the Site topic on the SeaHawk Forum.

Today I have uploaded a substantially re-written and expanded page on the Pedro.

This is the first update of the page since 2009, and includes a dozen new photographs and other images plus a link to a PDF containing a 1975 Price List and Brochure.

Visit the page at:

https://www.seahawk17.org.uk/boat-related-pedro.php

Exciting news has emerged of a possible new manufacturer of the SeaHawk.

Details are given on the History Page at:
https://www.seahawk17.org.uk/boat-history.php#since2010

See also this Forum Post.

I have today made changes to the layout of the site's forum.

The areas within the forum now appear in the following order:

Announcements and FAQs
Introduce Yourself
Gallery
My Boat
For Sale
Help Desk
General Discussion

The Gallery section is a new feature. It is intended for largely self-explanatory pictures with no more than a one line caption. Replies are not allowed. Questions or discussion about the images posted should be conducted in the Help Desk or General Discussion areas.

Within the next few days you can expect a major rebuild of the site to be released.

The main goal has been to make the site "mobile-friendly", so those who visit the site using phones and tablets will, at last, be able to do so without a lot of pinching, spreading, and scrolling. It should also lead to the site being much better ranked by search engines used on mobile devices.

For those using laptops and desktop computers, and perhaps larger tablets, things will look much the same and probably it will only be a change to the menu system that you will notice.

Because the revised site uses new techniques for delivering the pages (Web geeks will recognise it as driven by PHP) you may find that your existing bookmarks do not take you to the expected page. Hopefully, everything will be caught by the new "Oops! I Can't Find That Page" page, where there will advice on what to do.

With the major structural change in place, it should make it easier to keep the site updated. I plan to work my way through all the pages - there are over 110 of them containing a total of almost 600 different images - and update any with information that reflects the best current knowledge.

Once the new site is on-line, feedback about any pages that appear to hold information that conflicts with that on another page will be especially welcome, so they can be given priority treatment for update.

GregSeaHawk wrote

Within the next few days you can expect a major rebuild of the site to be released.

It's happened and quicker than I expected!

The newly constructed site is now running, with the new home page at:
https://www.seahawk17.org.uk/index.php

You should get re-directed automatically if you use the old address which ended in "index.htm".

Now the new site is on-line, I'd welcome feedback about any errors you find or any improvements you think could be made to make it still easier to use with phones and tablets.

Also, I am aware that some pages may hold information that conflicts with the contents of another. It's the consequence of the site having been built up slowly over ten years. I'll be trying to hunt them down in the next few weeks. Please do let me know if you spot any such conflicts.

I've had an email from Clive Marsh who reports:

Clive Marsh wrote

Hello Greg,

I have owned 2 SeaHawks in the past. The solution to the sticking centre plate was to replace the lifting wire with thin galvanised steel so the plate could be pushed down as well as pulled up.   In other words don't just rely on gravity.

Best

Clive Marsh

I've incorporated this recommendation into the page at:
https://www.seahawk17.org.uk/owners-maintenance-fittings-keel.php
adding a link to Clive's Review of the SeaHawk, which was published in Practical Boat Owner, and which has featured on the site for a while.

I have finally got round to upgrading communications with the site.

You'll find that you'll browser will report that all communications are encrypted. (You'll see the address is now prefixed with "https:// and most browsers will show a "padlock" icon.).

It should mean that you'll not get the warnings that you used to see when logging into the forum.

At long last I have added photographs of the cabin of Marsh Marigold (#323) to the Cabin Customisations page in the Owners Section under Customisations. There's also a commentary from me on what I see and can glean for the images.

Many thanks to Victoria Helby for the photographs.

Since the site became "mobile friendly" four years ago I have always been aware that the menu system introduced at that time didn't work well on small screens and those using lap/desktop computers found the menu that was provided for large screens also awkward to use as it was primarily designed for those using touch screen devices.

A re-vamp of the site has begun. Today's changes feature a new header image, changed menu system and re-ordered sections on the forum page.

The menu now works in the same way on both large and small screen and whether using a touch screen or keyboard and mouse. Hopefully this will make the site easier to navigate.

The forum areas have been rearranged to bring those most commonly used closer to the top of the page.

There are plans to introduce some further less dramatic refinements in the coming weeks.