Death by suicidal coxswain?
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I was hoping the captain was simply a fan of the great 90s track “Ship to Shore”
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Similarly, there was that incident a few years ago where a car carrier ended up on the Bramble Bank- an extremely well-known sandbank just outside Southampton:
It turned out to have been grounded deliberately to avoid sinking after it developed a severe list (for various reasons including a screw-up with loading).
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it’s probably naughty to fun up before not actually looking at the effect of port or starboard
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Coastal community, spending the day with his family instead of doing drugs or sitting on the computer…my guess is that this is the first time he was allowed to do it all by himself, which is why the camera was running.
I’d put this one in the win category.
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One theory is that there was a confusion between “tiller orders” and “rudder orders”.
To turn a ship to port (“left” for landlubbers), for example:
- you turned the wheel to port
- which moved the tiller to starboard
- which moved the rudder to port
- which made the ship turn to port
Traditionally, the command to do this would be given under “tiller orders”, which specified the movement of the tiller: in this case, “hard a starboard”.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a gradual transition to “rudder orders”, where the desired movement of the rudder is specified. This seems on the face of it to be much more logical, as this is also the direction you want the ship to go and the direction you need to turn the wheel to achieve this. However, sailors are nothing if not traditionalists. (Also many smaller vessels had no wheel: the helmsman would move the tiller by hand, so tiller orders would not be as wilfully perverse as might initially appear.)
The theory is that there was an initial confusion caused by a novice helmsman trained only in the new rules, costing the Titanic vital minutes.
James Cameron’s film has no truck with this theory: as soon as the order “hard a starboard” is given, the ship can be seen (correctly) turning to port, causing those in the audience with pretensions to nautical knowledge (including, I am embarrassed to admit, yours truly) to jeer at the “error”.
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I can’t stop watching this video of someone FASTLY, carefully, unerringly directing his speedboat into a pole on a large body of water.
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Here’s footage of him driving home after the boat crash.
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Outboards are very different from inboards. With an outboard you have a directional flow of water which applies push at the back*. To turn, the sideways thrust at the back has to be countered by a resistance to sideways motion near the front**. For a planing hull at speed, there isn’t any resistance worth speaking of, so applying a sideways force at the back does not pivot the hull nearly as much as you’d expect.
Inboard motors, roughly speaking, go with displacement hulls and depend on the rudder for steering. At speed the rudder force is amplified by the water from the prop cascading over it. You still need the resistance to sideways motion at the front, and this comes from that big immersed hull. In reverse, you have practically no steering because the prop is simply pulling water away from the rudder area. Therefore, if you might be going to hit something there is a decision to be made; can I steer past it (remembering that the boat basically pivots around somewhere forward of its middle and the back swings in) or do I have enough room to reverse and stop before I hit it, given I can’t be sure where the front part will end up.
Now you know what those big fender things are for.
Also known as “sail” or “steam” orders. Yes, I’ve read about that. Whatever the reason - and we will never know for sure - the iceberg was avoidable and the root cause was the shipowner’s decision to take that route. The recent suggestion that there was a fire in the coal, and that was why they were in a hurry to get to NY is interesting, quite possible (fires in coal were not uncommon) and an example of just how far we have come in mitigating transport risks. The advent of oil fuel and the turbine and Diesel engines were enormous steps forward in safety.
**
Extremely technical nautical terms corresponding approximately to “round end” and “pointy end”
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First Video: “This…IS a boating accident!”
Second Video: “GOOOAAAALLLLLLL!!!”
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there seems to be about half a dozen different videos of that beaching on YT
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It’s a jetboat, and those suckers turn on a dime.
It reminds me of when I was learning to ride a motorbike. My instructor repeatedly emphasised that not matter how bad things got, just keep looking at where you want the bike to go. As soon as you start focussing on that looming truck/pole/wall … yeah, that’s when you’re going to crash into it. And, as I proved to myself several times, he was 100% correct, on both sides of the advice.
My guess is this guy was looning about on the river, hamming it up for the camera, then suddenly noticed the pole and couldn’t break eye contact so drove straight in to it.
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I think I’ve watched this video about a hundred times since you posted it, mostly for the commentary at the very end.
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Maybe cutting power towards the end reduced his control authority. He couldn’t turn if the engine wasn’t pushing the back of the boat around.
Its possible that this man has spent more of his life driving cars than boats 
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You can see from the video that at any speed it is doing no such thing. The laws of motion don’t suspend themselves, and they are extremely clear on the subject.
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You don’t need to be an entitled rich kid to learn to handle a boat. Around here there is a sailing club which is very cheap to join, rowing and canoe clubs ditto. Where I grew up, our next door neighbour’s son was competing in sea dinghy racing at ten. He was also dyslexic. And if you can handle a small boat, handling a bigger one is not that much of a step up.
Now, what is really funny is watching an entitled rich adult who thinks because he has lots of money he has nothing to learn, buys a big boat which has bow thrusters, twin props and the rest of the gear and, the first time out, humiliates himself by getting stuck against the gates of a sea lock, discovering in the process that boats are not just cars without wheels.
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