Was your future wife the one that made the hole in the Soling? :-)


No, but talking to her may have made me slightly less attentive

Actually, I saw the other guy but Boston Harbor used to be (and
probably still is) full of hotshots who like to skim your transom on
port tack like they were in a race. By the time I realized he wasn't
going to do this, it was too late to take evasive action. The
burdened boat is supposed to maintain a predictable course anyway
although there is a fine line between doing this and failing to take
action to avoid a collision. I fault myself for not verifying that I
saw a pair of eyes, or at least a head, and learned.

His story was that he was in a channel and I was crossing it so he had
the right of way. It was arguably a channel because the area is
heavily buoyed and ones in the area were arranged to guide larger
boats to the gaps between a couple of islands but it was not charted
as such and we each would have had 20 feet of water under our keels
anywhere within half a mile.

--

Roger Long