HOME          MODEL RANGE         CONTACT US            GALLERY        VIDEO DOWNLOAD          PRICE LIST

NEW VIDEO DOWNLOAD PAGE

Now you can download our spectacular rough weather seakeeping and performance videos from our new Video download site. The videos are in fairly low resolution (MPEG 2 320 X 176 15fpm) necessitated for reasonable download times. Typical download time on broadband is 10-20 minutes, the files are around 15-25MB in size, however I wouldn't recommend trying to download on a standard 56k modem as the times would be way to long.  

To download, click on the download origional link above the thumbnail.

Click on this link to go to the video download site

TAKING THE VIDEO'S

Videos are taken from Roches Point light house at the entrance to Cork Harbour, the lighthouse is situated about 200ft above the cliffs, and gives a clear vantage point of the sea and harbour entrance. The harbour entrance can create some spectacular and dangerous seas, in wind over tide conditions the Atlantic swell meets an outgoing tide causing the waves to become very steep and break heavily at the mouth of the harbour, in storms I have seen them break continuously for 3-400 yds creating a carpet of foam. At the entrance is also the harbour rock, situated between the Chanel buoys, and over this, when the waves are big the swells break. When taking the videos we are able to verify the wind speed with the weather station at Roches point, wave heights I verify with the Marathon gas platform 20nm of the coast, If the platform is recording swell heights of 7m in deep water, those same swells will probably be more at the entrance in ebb tides (we always try to time the video to occur in the ebb to capture the worst conditions) There is such a huge difference in sea state between flood and ebb conditions at the harbour mouth that I estimate a force 6-7 blow with wind against tide creates a worse and more dangerous sea state than a full force 8 gale offshore. Wind direction plays a big part, the worst conditions occur in SE, S, and SSW, when it veers to the SW the seas go down, but it could still be blowing force 8 or 9. One point to bear in mind is that the waves never look so big from a high vantage point, but if you can't see the top of the boats aerials when your 200ft above the sea, then you know that it was a big wave. From the boat conditions and motions can be extreme. When doing the videos, up to about force 8 you can actively look for the bigger waves, We trust the Interceptor abilities to be able to face these and position the boat in a position to ride them, above force 8 you have to look for the bigger seas and avoid them, force 9 and above can be dangerous, force 10 and 11, I only leave that to the Cork Pilot boat when it actually has to go to sea or when a demonstration is required by a customer.

When taking the videos the biggest problem can be camera shake, in 60-70mph gusts it is hard to stand, let alone take good video footage, so a lot is unusable. The camera stills are taken with a Canon EOS 1 and a 50-500mm lens.