Brinks Sonnet 1

[SwanR]

Having completed my holiday tale I thought it worth writing up a piece on the boat itself - Brinks Sonnet 1 hired in May 2017.

Some good points - bow thrusters, plenty of storage, good layout and use of space, comfortable albeit the bed felt very hard to start with but we got used to that, electric winch for the mudweight albeit we had to have the yard out to fix it after first use, nice goodie bag of a few bits of food that came with the boat plus a hamper of local produce which we qualified for because we had previously hired with Barnes Brinkcraft within the last four years.

Some not so good points - a bit of a mind of its own with the steering - you have to think in advance as it's not as immediately responsive as other boats we have had but fine once you get used to it, no cushions provided for the seating area which are a nice touch from some other yards, the bed wasn't made up which again most yards do if you're hiring one of the elite class of boats.

Reported to the yard on handover that the bathroom light switch kept falling off the side of the washbasin where it was sited. Also the rev counter didn't work - it was on 1200 when the engine was off and could go up over its maximum of 3000 when cruising at what I reckoned was around 5 to 6 mph. There was nothing in the skippers manual either to tell you how to convert revs to mph so if I was new to boating I wouldn't have had a clue what speed I was doing. Plus the speedo on the fish nav thing didn't work either. Maybe they think that everyone will have an app on a smart phone which admittedly we did.

Wireless internet worked very well. There is a limit on free data. Once you have used that though you get a message on your device and you can't use any more without going through a sign up page to purchase it. Very good as it means that you can't run up a bill that you didn't know about.

All electric boat so the inverter is on all the time and you don't have to worry about gas.

Gauges for water and waste so you know where your tank levels are.

Only one bow rope which made side on mooring more difficult at times.

Air draft not displayed anywhere which I thought unusual as I'm sure that on most other boats we've hired it is displayed on a plaque at the helm. On Sonnet you would have to search through the skipper's manual to find it.

In conclusion it's a boat that is looking and feeling its age inside, bearing in mind that we had also hired Sonnet 3 four years ago when that was a much newer boat. But nonetheless it is very comfortable and a good boat for two people. However with all the new boats that are being built I think that it is becoming hard to justify calling it part of the elite fleet - the only reasons we could think that it qualified were the fact that it has bow thrusters and an electric mudweight. But we would hire it again if the price and availability suited us again another time.