Mid Size Power Boats

Aye, Aye, Captain!

As owner of the boat, you are captain of your vessel and in no small measure, master of your fate, if not your soul.

Another important factor goes beyond yourself. As boat owner and operator, you are responsible for the safety of your passengers.

That means that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can be held liable for your mistakes that end up in injury to others.

There is a very good reason why, in days of old, the captain of a ship possessed the powers of a sovereign: Ultimately he is responsible for the ship and its passengers since, while in the midst of the ocean he cannot call upon a wide range of government services.

In the immediacy of a crisis, all decisions are his to make, including the taking of all actions to ensure safety.

Thus, the responsibilities of boat ownership are greater than for any other type of vehicle you could own except for an aircraft.

Many boat owners attempt to forgo the effort it takes to learn how to read and use charts, and navigation aids which are the mariners “road maps”.

This lack of knowledge is most often the cause of running boats aground, which can damage the hull and engines.

In addition to nautical charts, the intelligent boater also learns to read the weather. He knows by experience the very serious dangers of getting caught in a severe weather.

Inherent Unseaworthiness

It is possible that a vessel is inherently unseaworthy, either for a particular use, or for any use at all.

If you’re shopping for new boats, you may have noticed that there are no builders who specify in their literature what range of operations their boats are fit for, though there is a move underway to require them to do that.

Presently, it’s strictly caveat emptor, up to you to determine whether the design of a particular boat is suitable for how you use it.

If you’re a newbie or even moderately experienced, this can pose serious difficulties in trying to decide what’s what.

You may even be under the impression that all boats are more or less seaworthy for the normal range of conditions that people normally use them.

That would be a mistake, for there are many boats on the market that are unseaworthy for anything but calm water operation and finding out which is which requires an expert.

Tragedies at Sea

The following true stories will illustrate my point. I am intimately familiar with these two stories because I was the investigator hired by the insurers of those two boats.

In both cases, I concluded that both vessels were unseaworthy for the intended voyage and it was aggravated by operator error.

Neither were aware of the acute limitations of their vessels.

These stories are not related to gratuitously scare you, but to illustrate how cavalier the boat building industry can be, along with public attitudes toward recreational boating.

Plus I relate them because very few of such stories ever make into the major media and almost never the boating publications.

There is a very common misperception that because a boat is built by a large company, it must be okay.

All too often it is not okay. All too often basic issues of seaworthiness are severely compromised in favor of marketing decisions. All too often, fundamental quality issues are compromised in favor of price.

All too often people buy boats that they know, in their own words “are not very sea worthy,” yet they buy them anyway with the rationalization that “I won’t go out when the weather is bad.”

Of course it is highly likely that the day will come when a nice day suddenly turns bad and they get caught in conditions they didn’t expect to have to deal with. Happens all the time with more than a few paying a high price.

Both of these stories illustrate what a healthy respect for the sea is by illustrating what a lack of respect for the sea is, wherein respect is something born of experience or knowledge of the risks the sea imposes: