Reese Palley
is a writer and sailor who lives in Key West and Philadelphia
On land, a quick swerve avoids what could otherwise be a serious accident. It happens a thousand times a day on the streets of Philadelphia. However, there are no quick swerves at sea.
Any change of direction or speed for even a small outboard motorboat takes a finite amount of time. Since a ship's hull does not have the same grip on the water that a car has on the road, turns in water are characterized by drift and crabbing, not necessarily in the direction the skipper at the wheel wants to go. Events move ponderously at sea.
Things get worse when a huge unpowered barge comes upon an obstacle. Think of all the barges that have struck unmoving bridge supports that to a landlubber would seem impossible to miss. More to the point are the repeated crashes of big ferryboats as they come into their berth.
Docking a ferry by a captain who has done the same maneuver a thousand times before should present no problem. But it does, and this lack of maneuverability is one of the problems that might have led to the sinking of the drifting duck boat on the river Wednesday. That having been said, it is no excuse for the captain of the tugboat, whose prime directive is not to hit anything with his huge and lethal barge.
In my time at sea we have had dozens of near misses, one by a thousand-foot-long tanker in the Indian Ocean as it swept blindly by our little sailboat at 20 knots. Luckily, we were not hit, but the wash of that mountain of steel nearly sank us.
To avoid collisions at sea, rigid rules of the road and communications have been imposed upon every ship, large or small. What is puzzling about this event is that neither the tug captain nor the Coast Guard seemed to have been alerted by an emergency radio call. Or if the call went out, were they paying attention? Or was no call made because the duck boat had lost electricity as well as power? Of course, that's still no excuse. My own small sailboat had three battery-operated handheld radios for just such an emergency.
Assuming it received word of the drifting boat, the Coast Guard should have made all on the river aware that there was a danger to navigate.
As to the tug captain, ships are required to mount lookouts at all times, and yet it has been reported that there was no one aboard the barge. That is a serious violation.
The tug, blinded by the barge it was pushing, should have maintained its vision of what was before it. If the tug captain were able to depend on radar, which would have given a clear picture of the boat, then the only conclusion would be that no one on the tug was watching the radar screen. This, combined with no lookout, means the tug could not see the duck boat.
But perhaps the tug crew did see the duck boat, but nothing could have been done in time. If so, then why was the duck boat in the big-ship lanes in the first place? These lanes are for boats that draw up to 40 or so feet; the duck boat seems to draw about six or seven feet.
If, as reported, the boat had lost power and was adrift, was an anchor deployed? And, more critically, how quickly after power loss? Certainly an anchored boat in shallow water would have been safe from the passing monsters. Allowing the boat to drift into the channel was, as demonstrated, not a clever choice.
And then there was the matter of the 45 seconds' warning. What was the captain of the boat doing as he watched the great ship bear down on him? Or, indeed, was he watching at all?
The only conclusion that makes sense is that the duck-boat captain was busy with other matters related to the fire and loss of power, and he had not appointed a lookout to be aware of what was taking place about his ship.
The collision appears to suggest that many must share in the guilt for two lives presumably lost.
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Find this article at: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/20100711_Questions_and_blame_abound_in_duck-boat_sinking.html