AVOID THAT SINKING FEELING
BY STEERING CLEAR OF HAZARDS
Fred Dyson – Dyson's Starboard View – Messing About in Boats
On the water you can get in trouble hitting any of the following: other boats, docks, driftwood, sand bars, swimmers, breakwaters, locks, lines, water skiers, jet skis, and enforcement officers. The penalties for the above infractions can vary, but they include death, sinking, injury, embarrassment, vessel damage, lawsuits, and damaged relationships.
Collisions are a major cause of maritime disasters. Just remember that boats don't have brakes, and sometimes putting the boat in reverse doesn't work or is not enough. I remember, as a boy, being with my dad when he was running the engines of a big yacht for a fat, rich, crooked cop in Seattle.
The cop and his party were pretty drunk as we: carne back to the dock. He rang down on the engine room telegraph for my dad to "stop engines." Dad did, and then threw the cams over so that the big, direct drive diesel engines would run in reverse.
The cop rang down for "half astern." Dad hit the engines with compressed air (most engines have air starters) and immediately gave them half throttle and then picked me up and sat me against the forward bulkhead (front wall). The big yacht started vibrating as the props tried to counter the vessel's speed. Over the voice tube came a desperate plea, "more", just as we hit the dock with a splintering crash.
In a future article I will tell about a Kodiak seiner that penetrated under a dock for forty feet when the marine gear refused to shift into reverse; reputedly a record for that size vessel.
Driftwood is a problem in areas where rivers bring down the logs, or where logs get away from log rafts on their way to the mill. In Puget Sound where I grew up, the logs would lay at the surface and would be difficult to see in a chop or looking into the sun. The worst ones would sink vertically and bob, with the big end up, just under the surface. They are called "dead heads," a term that reflects what is thought of a skipper who hits one. Hull damage and/or prop and shaft damage are inevitable if you are going fast.
A friend, Calvin Lauwers, hit a driftwood log as he was going into the Cinder River, in a skiff, in the dark. The results were spectacular. The outboard, complete with a section of the transom, somersaulted into the boat. Calvin is a very tolerant guy, but he says that a snarling forty-horse engine, with the wick turned up; is not his boating companion of choice.
Sandbars are somewhat more forgiving than hitting docks, but they can do amazing things to the crew and loose items in the boat. In Bristol Bay, a thirty-two-foot gillnetter was steaming at high speed into shallow water to drop anchor. When they hit the sandbar, the deck hand, who was standing on the foredeck, was thrown overboard. The skipper flipped over the spray shield of the flying bridge and landed on top of the anchor winch. As I heard it, they were both pretty grumpy for a couple of days.
In a similar incident, I was told that a crew launching distance record was set by a. powerboat that hit a sandbar on the Big Susitna River. Eye-witnesses reported the boat was doing at least thirty knots (nautical miles per hour - 34-plus mph) when it hit. Slavishly following the laws of conservation of momentum, the skipper kept on going. His head and shoulders cleaned the windshield and forward deck hardware from off the bow.
His companion, who was encumbered only by a hand-held beer bottle, took advantage of the cleared runway and sailed an amazing sixty-eight feet before coming to rest on the sandbar. Skeptics have taken exception to this incident going down in the record books, because the second man skipped twice upon hitting the sandbar.
This type of incident may be the origin of some small boats being called launches.
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