I am posting this because of an event I witnessed earlier this week in Shelter Island, where we had gone for a few days. It happened at the dock of the hotel where we were staying, where boats often stopped temporarily to pick up or let off passengers, friends, etc. In this case, the boat was, I am pretty sure, an Eastbay 54 Flybridge. Two guys were running the boat, one was the owner, the other crew or family, never sure which. They tied up on their starboard side to one of the two docks that each went out from the beach about 75-100ft, and seemed to handle the boat competently on arrival. It was close to high tide when they arrived. Nothing much happened until later in the afternoon, when the owner came back and had a hard time getting back on the boat; he had to reach across about a 3ft gap, and pull himself up and over the rail. At the time I was wondering how such an expensive boat didn't have a better boarding system.
About 5:30 2 carloads of people showed up, turned out they were there to celebrate the owner's birthday with an evening cruise, but they couldn't get on the boat at this point as it was even further from the dock. It looked to me like they were actually aground based on the boat's motion, or lack of, but they tried a bunch of stuff to get the boat to the dock, including running the bow and stern thrusters, and having several people pull on their docking lines. Nothing worked, of course; that model weighs around 60,000lbs, and draws over 4ft, and at that point it was almost dead low tide. They called Sea Tow, and when the boat eventually showed up he took one look, stuck a rod into the water to show them they were in less than two feet, said there was really nothing he could do until the tide came back in - high tide that day was right around midnight - so he drove away.
The owner laid a paddle board across the gap so his guests could board, but even that was pretty dicey; he must have been pretty embarrassed at that point.
He wasn't able to leave the dock until around 10PM, and the "party" had wound down long before, although everyone sang a couple of rounds of "Happy Birthday" from the dock.
It was easy to watch this happen and feel like that would never happen to me; even without checking tides, a simple glance at the depth gauge should have shown him that he needed to move to deeper water, but later I thought, if I tied up my boat to a fixed dock at a hotel, how much care would I take to be sure I would have enough water under the boat for the next several hours?
If you spend that much money on a boat seems like you should be pretty careful to treat it well, and it wouldn't have taken much effort to avoid the problem completely.
Maybe the hotel should have said something to him about the tides, since it was their dock? The tide drop was around 3 ft., and if he had simply tied up at the "T" end of the dock he would have been fine.
I have hit bottom before, but at slow speeds, and was able to back off under my own power, once in a sailboat in the ICW, once in-shore in the Cranberry Islands, but grounding while at the dock doesn't seem like something that should happen.
Obviously there are places where the tide changes are pretty big, like parts of the Maine coast, but if you know nothing else, seeing docks floating up and down on fixed piers has to make you think, and generally those docks run out far enough so boats have enough water even at low tide.
Was the owner just not thinking, or am I being too harsh on the guy?
Maybe this happens more often than I think, and I just had never been right there to watch it as it happened?
Curious what everyone thinks?
Peter
About 5:30 2 carloads of people showed up, turned out they were there to celebrate the owner's birthday with an evening cruise, but they couldn't get on the boat at this point as it was even further from the dock. It looked to me like they were actually aground based on the boat's motion, or lack of, but they tried a bunch of stuff to get the boat to the dock, including running the bow and stern thrusters, and having several people pull on their docking lines. Nothing worked, of course; that model weighs around 60,000lbs, and draws over 4ft, and at that point it was almost dead low tide. They called Sea Tow, and when the boat eventually showed up he took one look, stuck a rod into the water to show them they were in less than two feet, said there was really nothing he could do until the tide came back in - high tide that day was right around midnight - so he drove away.
The owner laid a paddle board across the gap so his guests could board, but even that was pretty dicey; he must have been pretty embarrassed at that point.
He wasn't able to leave the dock until around 10PM, and the "party" had wound down long before, although everyone sang a couple of rounds of "Happy Birthday" from the dock.
It was easy to watch this happen and feel like that would never happen to me; even without checking tides, a simple glance at the depth gauge should have shown him that he needed to move to deeper water, but later I thought, if I tied up my boat to a fixed dock at a hotel, how much care would I take to be sure I would have enough water under the boat for the next several hours?
If you spend that much money on a boat seems like you should be pretty careful to treat it well, and it wouldn't have taken much effort to avoid the problem completely.
Maybe the hotel should have said something to him about the tides, since it was their dock? The tide drop was around 3 ft., and if he had simply tied up at the "T" end of the dock he would have been fine.
I have hit bottom before, but at slow speeds, and was able to back off under my own power, once in a sailboat in the ICW, once in-shore in the Cranberry Islands, but grounding while at the dock doesn't seem like something that should happen.
Obviously there are places where the tide changes are pretty big, like parts of the Maine coast, but if you know nothing else, seeing docks floating up and down on fixed piers has to make you think, and generally those docks run out far enough so boats have enough water even at low tide.
Was the owner just not thinking, or am I being too harsh on the guy?
Maybe this happens more often than I think, and I just had never been right there to watch it as it happened?
Curious what everyone thinks?
Peter
