Tom, I've been delivering boats for more than half of my life, now... Though I've generally tried to avoid it, I still have a fair amount of experience with owners aboard their boats, many of them rather inexperienced... I can only say, it's pretty spooky how much faith many of them place in these gizmos, most of what they've learned about navigation is probably from the use of the GPS in their cars, and their absolute belief that what they see on their plotter screen truly represents where they are on the Earth's surface... (grin)

I think I have a pretty good picture what was going on aboard RULE 62 that night... It was a crew that desperately wanted OFF THAT DAMN BOAT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE... Nothing else mattered, the guy was obviously inexperienced to the point where he was unable to rationally assess the situation, and accept that heaving-to and waiting for daylight, or making for a tenable open roadstead anchorage that was only another 5-6 hours away, and could have been safely approached in darkness, would have been the only sensible option...

Incidents such as this are still so relatively rare, I don't see where one obtains the "data" to support one argument or the other... Navigation has become so simple today, one would think the occurrence of these sorts of things would almost be eliminated entirely... And yet, I think I still see about the same proportion of boats going aground on the ICW as I did 20 years ago... And, it's certainly not limited to recreational boaters, either. You heard about this one, right?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408698/Polish-captain-ran-ship-aground-tried-sail-Scotland-Belgium--FORGOT-England-way.html

I think it's pretty clear that some people are doing things based upon the perceived infallibility of electronic navigation that would have been unthinkable years ago... Hell, I'm sometimes even guilty of it myself (grin) When I was in Belize, I was stunned to hear on the NW Caribbean Net one morning, somone asking for the GPS waypoints for Ranguana Pass, an unlit break in the reef that they intended to transit that night... And, the Net Controller gave them to them... Do you really think people were attempting that sort of thing routinely, taking that sort of risk, back in the days pre-GPS?