Jonathan Ganz wrote:
In article et,
Bill McKee bmckee=at-ix.netcom.com wrote:

"DSK" wrote in message
...

Bill McKee wrote:

Probably like a lot if sailors, you turn when ever you want, and then
yell at a power boat for impeding you.

Probably like a lot of motorboaters, you have no clue what's involved in
sailing, and think that all boats can be driven like a car.

DSK


I know what is involved with sailing. Married a good sailors daughter and
used to windsurf. But too many "sailors" figure they have the right of way
as they have a sailboat. I have had "sailors" do a 90 degree in front of me
when lifting the sails and the iron sail is still running, and then yell at
me. They would yell even louder if I collided with them and when they had
to pay enormous sums of money to me.


What's your point? If you know the Rules of the Road, there's never
much doubt about who should give way.


Surely not the overtaking vessel? Must a vessel desiring to turn
from main channel to side route stand on past a harbour entrance
because a zoomer wants to pass between them and their port?

Could we invent turn signals for slow boats, to give those with
power, speed and a lack of courteous patience a more easily notable
legal signal of intentions to turn, given that noisy power vessels
make horn signals adequate for listening and watching sailors
inaudible aboard kilowatt stereo disco boats? Or would such
unauthorized lighting distract starlet eyed go boaters from their
fore deck ornaments?

Do these power mongers not understand the need of sailors to turn
into the wind to hoist their main sails?

Nor is there much doubt as to how hard it is to hit a planing power
boat with a sail boat, and vice versa.

Honest savvy power boaters well know the paranoid schizophrenia they
have forced on sailors and the bad reputation their wild mannered
birds of similar feathering have cultivated for them, well know the
secret rabid detestation that fires every sailor's killing passions
and undeniable mad obsession with reach ramming power boats who so
foolishly come so close as to make possible such sweet, aching
temptation to chisel yet another notch in their stems, and well know
to stay away, as they should from a starved tiger on a short chain.

Those who actually get rammed by sailboats have no one to blame but
themselves, (even the law of the sea agrees,) unless their canny X's
have topped the limit on their gas cards, and the grinning fates
deliver them to their well deserved, slow motion fates. Gradual
horror overtake them, woe by tides and drift the planing challenged
fume less speed boater who dallies wake less long enough for the
long plotting sailors' pack to organize, isolate, surround and
subsume their deserving victims, should Poseidon aid them and grant
conspiring seas, wind and grant calls for rights to starboard tack.

Like a wounded fawn in the teeth of crippled octogenarian wolves,
surely their vessels shall be dismembered and dispersed without
trace, like diseased baby seals in the toothless jaws of tired and
gallopless killer whales.

Aarrgghh! The longer takes the victory, the sweeter the vine of
triumph, the sweeter the smoke of the roasting. May they all overheat;^)

Terry K