Knucklehead of the week award goes to . . .

[barcoo]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

I tend to the opinion that any signal of any sort would have been superfluous.

Prior to my desperate resort to reversing I had been tacking up the channel with full main and genoa. It gets pretty busy there in the morning with tourist boats going out to Green and Fitzroy Islands and the reef. One of the large multihull jet boats insisted on passing me on the correct side of the channel just before I was about to tack and passing around my bow, left the channel and started spewing mud out of his jets. There was plenty of room on the wrong side as the channel is wide enough for large cruise and cargo ships.

It was quiet entertaining and ended OK but could have been serious with a foot less water.

Many years ago, about 55, the Cairns channel used to have just sticks in the mud to mark the edge of the channel. At nighttime the only lights were at the entrance so you had something to steer towards. no radar etc then. I was at the helm while my dad was attending to something. He came topside just in time as I nearly collided with one of the sticks. The water outside the channel is very shallow at low tide and one night misjudged the tide and ran aground in the mud. Thankfully the tide was coming in so in an hour he was on his way back to the wharf on Smiths creek. We used to tie up at the old cannery wharf.