Making your boat engine a difficult catch for thieves

As the Governments Covid-19 restrictions are slowly rescinding, anglers living close to Lough Corrib and our many other great waterways are eager to get out fishing. But just as anglers seek the opportunity to land a nice catch, criminals may take the opportunity to steal your boat engine.

Last year quite a number of outboard engines were stolen off boats around Lough Corrib and indeed other parts of the country. So, if you have a boat and engine, please consider the following crime prevention advice.

Crime prevention is based on ten main principles, all of which aim to deter, delay and detect the criminal. So, in order to tackle this problem, I’m going to refer to some of these principles. Let’s firstly look at ‘target removal’.

Quite simply this means making sure that any object in which a potential offender might be interested is not visible or is taken away. So can you take the engine off your boat after use and bring it home with you?

I appreciate this is not always possible given both the weight of the engine and its proximity to transport based on your mooring location: but if removed it obviously provides the best security for your engine.

The next principle of crime prevention is ‘target hardening’. This means making targets more resistant to attack or more difficult to remove or damage. Many anglers use different types of locks which secure the outboard engine to the boat. From my experience many of these locks are not very secure and can be broken off or forced open.

No matter how strong your lock is, your boat is made of wood or fiberglass, and they can become the weak point. Therefore I would recommend locking the engine to an external anchor point using a high standard lock and chain. Pass the chain through openings in the engine such as the mounting bracket and lock it to a pre-set anchor point on the pier or shoreline.

The next principle is ‘reducing the pay-off’, which means reducing the gain for the criminal if a crime is committed. So, you can make your engine less attractive to a criminal by removing the plastic cowling engine cover. Criminals are stealing engines to sell, so an engine without a cover is less attractive.                                                                                      

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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