I was on a two week camping and scuba diving vacation on a coral atoll on the great barrier reef. We had our own aluminum-hulled inflatable-pontoon boat for diving and would take turns driving to and from the dive sites. One day I was puttering along inside the lagoon whenwe suddenly hit the shallow reef and ended up perched on top. I looked around, determined all of my charges were safe, and calmly said “we’re here “.
I’d pay good money to see a recording on the bridge as this went down.
I was on a cruise ship in the Panama Canal when the pilot misjudged the length of the ship and an overhanging wing of the Lido deck got hung up on the “hump” surrounding one of the locks. Whole ship tilted slightly and there was an impressive sound as 72,000 tons of ships was hanging on that protrusion.
Afterword, you could go back to the stern and look up to see what had been a heavy steel girder supporting the wing now looked like Wile E. Coyote had impacted it with his head from below and there were scrapes dings, dents and scuffs down about 200 feet of the ship’s hull when we scraped the lock side.
We tied up Canal traffic for a couple of hours (old canal and one side was down for lock maintenance so we held up world traffic while no doubt some interesting and amusing exchanges were held on the bridge and over the radio.
