Yes, excellent point.

It brings up the question of horns in my mind again. I don't use
sound signals or radio in the harbor, primarily because my hands are
simply too full. Although horn signals might cover my ass legally,
there is isn't much chance of my horn being heard in a powervessel
pilothouse. Even if it was, they probably wouldn't distinguish it
from the idiots tooting hello to their buddies and other general
chaos.

I've thought about installing an air horn so my boat could make a lot
of noise but this would probably result in large vessels looking
around for something big and then misunderstanding because so few
small sailing vessels can make real noise or use sound signals. If
everyone in our small harbor was tooting at each other, it would be a
little nutty. It might be different if more than 15% of the pleasure
boaters had a clue. The last time I tried to use a horn in a harbor
it just resulted in a big power boat that wasn't even a traffic factor
leaning on his horn and giving me the finger because he thought I was
being unreasonable to be tooting at him. I wasn't but, for a lot of
those guys, it's all about them.

I'm not sure the ferry captains would care or bother to yak with every
small boat out there. I'm quite comfortable with the radio. In my
flying days, I would talk to several airplanes at untowered fields as
we all figured out how to not hit each other when hard to see against
the landscape, going fast, different altitudes, etc.

It's different when two, or just a few, boats are out in more open
water. My encounter was actually one of those situations where horn
and radio would have been useful. Because these situation arise so
seldom, the horn was just out of reach and the radio inside. Believe
me, I'm rethinking that but no solid conclusions yet. In this
situation, a timely luff, even though a bit dicey, was still a better
option than trying to handle the boat and deal with horns and radios
at the same time.

--

Roger Long