Trawling the ICW, day 6
I got to watch two tests this morning. They were both a pop quiz in theschool of hard knocks. The student was a sailboat weenie, and I later learned he was on a sailboat he had recently purchased, and thus he was still on the steep side of the learning curve. The first pop quiz on this particular morning was "how to back out of a marina slip with a current coming towards the rear of the boat". The skipper flunked that pop quiz, and the current quicky pinned the port side of his sailboat against the other boats still in their slips, including ours. This set the stage for the second pop quiz: how to get the sailboat off the boats it was now pinned against by the current. Unfortunately, the sailboat skipper flunked that quiz as well. I happened to know the correct answer to that particular quiz, but I have always been a little reluctant to tell someone how to run their boat. Fortunately, one of the marina employees also knew the answer to the quiz, and he was not shy about telling the skipper what to do (perhaps he had some insight into marina liability issues that motivated him to speak out). He instructed the skipper as to the correct answer to the quiz, and the sailboat was able to escape shortly thereafter. Do you know the answer to the quiz?Okay, time's up. Here is what you do. You attach one end of a line to the bow of the boat (in this case, the port side), and the other end to the dock. You then put the helm hard over (in this case, all the way to port), put the engine in forward gear, and give it some power. The boat tries to turn the bow to port, which it can not do because of the dock. The result is that the stern is pushed to starboard, which in this case is into the current. Once the boat is parallel to the current, the skipper puts the engine into reverse and backs away from the dock (assuming someone remembered to release the line tied to the dock). Don't you just hate a pop quiz first thing in the morning?
There are some serious go-fast boats along the ICW. I was taking a walk one evening and came across a boat for sale at a marine dealership. It was a big open cockpit, center console fishing boat, with three 250 hp Yamaha outboards on the stern. I figured that combination would be hard to beat, but I was wrong. The next afternoon, I was out on my walk and saw a different boat at a different dealership; an open cockpit center console fishing boat, with three 300 hp Suzuki outboards on the stern. I guess when it comes to burning massive amounts of fuel to go "messing about in boats", there is no upper limit. As a foot note, on the same afternoon I saw the 300 hp engines, I passed a sign for a type of business that I had never seen before. The sign said "Colon Hydrotherapy", which I assumed was the rough equivalent of "Ennemas R Us". When it comes to businesses that Americans will happily support, there is no lower limit.
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