Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

My hart goes out to these people. It's so sad.

The picture is of me repairing the hull, rudder and keel of a friends boat who took the advice of a "local" coming into an unmarked channel. It wasn't really unmarked but was marked with a hard to see range. The range lights were lost in the houses on the hill and before he could pick them out he had moved to close and landed on the reef. We had been separated in Mona Passage during some bad weather and he arrived two hours ahead of me and didn't want to wait. I had the chart of the harbor so that was a pretty bad mistake. We managed to pull him off with the help of a fishing boat in the harbor but significant damage had been done. It took us two weeks at anchor to stop the water and get the rudder back on well enough to move. We had to cut out about a quarter of the side and rebuild it, redo the front of the keel and completely rebuild the rudder after we managed to get the boat to Puerto Rico. This happened in the late 80's or early 90's. All it takes is to drop your guard for a few minutes. One moment of poor judgement and any one of us could be in the same situation. Evan was right when he said that this would have been the perfect time to go in by dinghy first to check it out. There is no substitute for spacial awareness.

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