The Right Boat

rescues and such

Over the weekend, a 45’ boat with 30 people aboard sank near Miami’s Sea Aquarium.  Everyone was saved, including a dog.  The boat was probably certified by the Coast Guard to carry that many passengers, assuming it didn’t have a hole in its bottom.  Once it started taking on water and passengers began jumping off like rats, fearing the boat would turn over on top of them, it put a lot of people in the drink at one time.

The Coast Guard reported that the rescue was “an incredible effort,” by all sorts of boats.  Cue the video.  

It was Columbus Day, a major boating, drinking, drugging and nakedness day in Biscayne Bay.  National Park waters were off limits due to the “government shutdown,” so it’s easy to imagine thousands of boats “partying” in the northern parts of the Bay.  

What a madhouse it must have been, with boats of all sorts jockeying to pluck swimmers to safety.  “There!” said a drunk skipper, “Get that one with the blonde hair!  No, not her, she’s too fat to lift!  Pick one out!  Pick a good one!”

Getting someone from the water over the side and into your boat can be very difficult in calm conditions.  In Wilmington, North Carolina, one bluebird day my 8-year-old son and I watched an overloaded 13’ Boston Whaler flip over in the intracoastal waterway, caused by the wake of a passing boat.  These folks were taking guests out for a quiet boat ride. (Inexperienced operators often misjudge a boat’s seaworthiness by how it behaves in ideal conditions, and they have no framework for understanding how quickly things can get nasty out on the water.)

I called the Coast Guard, then hurried to help.  There were four adults--two men in their fifties and their wives, all large people-- and two young girls clinging to the bottom of the Whaler when we arrived.  The water was cold.  We pulled the little girls aboard first, and my son got them in the cabin, wrapped in blankets.  The most athletic of the men was able to climb our boarding ladder with my help.  He and I dragged his pal aboard with considerable difficulty.  He lay in the bottom of the boat, exausted.  The women, both over 200 lbs, were unable to hold onto the ladder with sufficient strength to make any progress.  Another, smaller boat with lower sides, came to help, and managed to get the two women aboard.  With everyone safe, we headed to a nearby dock.  Eventually, the Coast Guard arrived, lights flashing, to the rescue.

Operating a power boat doesn’t require an operator’s license.  The range of operator ignorance and stupidity is unbelievable out on the water.  

The Coast Guard and the Power Squadron teach boating safety, but attendance never keeps up with boat sales.

I sold a 16’ Donzi speedboat to a man in Pompano in my 1970s boat dealer days.  The boat was very expensive, capable of 65 mph, and called for expert handling.  The customer gave the boat to his son, who was 12 years old.  On day one he ran it aground on a sandbar at high speed, injuring himself and a passenger, destroying the boat’s outdrive unit and holing the hull.  Here’s the fun part:  the father sued me, claiming that the outdrive was defective.  I know it sounds crazy, but I was somehow to blame for an outdrive that would run into submerged objects.  Many boat owners have the attitude, based on years of driving safely down paved roads, that what they’re looking at--the surface of the water--is all there is to it.  “Looks good, let’s go,” they seem to say.

Drunks and druggies rent high-speed jet-ski boats everyday in Key West.  The ones with minor injuries like smashed faces end up in line at the hospital with the drunks and dopers who rent motor scooters.  No operator experience is required to rent either one.

When I was a teenager in Fort Pierce my pals and I would drive over to the inlet late in the afternoon if there was a fast-falling tide and strong winds from the east or southeast.  The seas build up dangerously in those conditions.  The fun was watching inexperienced boaters in ill-suited boats in the heavy seas.  Often the boaters heading out the inlet to the east on a sunny day didn’t realize what they were looking at--towering seas with steep faces that make the horizon look like the water’s wrinkling.  By the time they recognized the problem, they were in deep doo-doo, unable to turn the boat around, heading for the open ocean.  Usually, after a few minutes of pure panic, which you could see and hear from the safety of the parking lot, the boat would do what boats do, and float down-tide on a wet roller-coaster of a ride, through the nastiest of the seas to calmer waters outside the inlet.  The U.S. Coast Guard had a rescue station nearby, and routinely sent crews to pluck people from boats that were swamped.

Late afternoon summer thunderstorms made that situation worse.  Ignorant boaters would head out in the ocean to fish in the morning, when the tide was flooding and the inlet was calm, before the wind picked up.  They’d fish all day, then someone aboard would notice a building thunderstorm back on land, and they’d head home, into the now-treacherous inlet, against the tide, afraid but determined.  They’d take a beating worse than those going down-tide, but usually they’d make it in past the rough water and head to the boat ramp. (Experienced boaters would make the decision to wait offshore, out of the inlet until the tide changed, when it would be safer.)

At the boat ramp, where we’d drive to watch the small boats arrive, all sorts of craziness would occur, particularly if the thunderstorm struck.  The boat’s occupants would be terrified, probably feeling like they were in Hell, having been beaten by the seas, now hammered by lightning, wind and rain.  Sometimes it was like watching a clown car unload, with people jumping out of the boat onto the slippery concrete ramp before it had stopped.   

These boats are the ones you see behind homes on their trailers for years, and marinas stay full of big boats whose owners met the Gulfstream on a bad day.  It gets scary very fast on the water.