Errant boat forces five ships to divert in Admiralty Inlet traffic jam (and why this matters)

[uppityperson]

This part of Admiralty Inlet is the part of that bends around and heads south into Puget Sound. This is the area where military ships and now submarines come to unload/reload things that go boom (not nukes) at Indian Island before heading down into Puget Sound, or before heading out to sea again. There have been nuclear powered subs there as well as conventional ships. This is also the shipping lane into Puget Sound that all ships, containers, oil, etc, go through. Local people have been trying to work with Indian Island about nuke powered subs, since the fear has been an incident might happen. On to the story:

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20070930/NEWS/709300305

In Admiralty Inlet fog, a small boat forced five commercial shipping vessels - a laden oil tanker, a container ship and three others - to steer out of the deep-water shipping lane in the middle of Puget Sound and skirt the west edge of Whidbey Island to avoid a collision.

Had the vessels been unsuccessful, there could have been an oil spill or dozens of shipping containers from Asia floating in Puget Sound, said Mark Ashley, operations director Coast Guard Puget Sound Vessel Traffic Service in Seattle.
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"The traffic lanes for ships are similar to I-5 - inbound lanes and outbound lanes and a median," Ashley said.

Two southbound vessels - a large container ship and a tanker - were forced east, across the imaginary median and into the path of the three northbound ships. The northbound ships had to move east too, much closer to Whidbey Island than usual, Ashley said....(more@link)

[sneakythomas]

1. Somebody's lucky they're not getting a darwin award.

I've spent a lot of time on the water and my experience with those ships is that a good number of them just figure getting out of the way is your problem. It is a basic rule of seamanship that you know the area you are in, and what the rules and restrictions for that area are. That's why they print marine charts.

I'm really glad somebody didn't get forced onto the rocks by some idiot.

[ManiacJoe]

2. I am rather surprised that they would

attempt to divert any large ships for an idiot in a "small boat". The least maneuverable vessel usually has the right of way, especially when they have the right of way in the first place.

[sneakythomas]

3. Or as my father put it, when teaching me seamanship

"Give way to weight."

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. Those big ships haul ass.

I've been in north sound in the fog, and it's easy to become disoriented.

There is no way that a small sailboat (for instance) can move out of the way if they find themselves in traffic.

Yes, the onus is on the small boater to stay out of the traffic lanes, but it is easy to do. I won't do it any more without radar and gps.

When they describe it as being "like I-5", that's true to a point. Now imagine that the freeway was nothing more than a solid sheet of asphalt stretching as far as you can see in each direction (about 200 yards) and that the spacing between the yellow stripe delineating the northbound and southbound lanes had gaps 2 miles apart

[Turbineguy]

4. There was the collision in 1995

where a small boat ended up on the bulbous bow of a containership. The occupants of the motorboat had gone into the cabin for something and had let the boat drift into the shipping lane.

The picture made the national papers. I recall the Inquirer made it sound as if the ship pounced on them.