Respect the lee shore and high winds

Today in Los Angeles. A small sailboat (tiller rather than wheel) found itself off the pier at Redondo Beach having a lot of trouble clawing its way off the lee shore---not clear if that was rigging problem, inexperience, over-confidence, or what.

Ends badly.

All four survived, two in hospital now; reports are at least a dislocated shoulder and the other guy has his back mashed up. Boat was cracked in two and split/sank.
siftbotsays...

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Saturday, April 1st, 2017 12:02am PDT - promote requested by original submitter SFOGuy.

bamdrewsays...

This looks like one overconfident sailor who had planned to bring friends with modest sailing experience out for a day on the water and refused to let high, gusting winds hold him back.

They couldn't control the boat enough to keep the mainsail up in gusty winds, and if they had the boat would likely be leaning and flagging soo far over in choppy seas that the passengers would be right to be scared of the boom taking one of them out. It doesn't look like there is an outboard motor, so I guess they somehow got out of the slip and away from docks on just the jib, then hit the real wind gusts.

And now the video starts with mainsail down and getting in the way, jib not fully up but providing some pull, and that pull being lost to waves and poor steering. The sailor is messing with lines up front while the tiller is manned by someone who is waaay out of their element, and who begins to just jack-knife the thing from 0:20 onwards, halting all forward momentum. I don't want to come down on that person too hard, because none of them should have been out there that day, and the sailor should have been manning the till or at least yelling very specific orders at the top of his lungs well before the situation got this bad. No idea why they don't have an outboard motor, maybe they lost it. If its a rental, that rental agency should not have let them go out there.

(grammar edits)

SFOGuysays...

Been doing some research; story gets stranger; that is apparently a well known racing boat on the Southern California seen. How odd. They should have known better. That might explain somethings though: No motor, that's added weight and no anchor to toss out while they are still in a salvageable if not comfortable situation outside the impact/breaker zone so they could sort stuff out.

Scary video for me; I respect the water.

bamdrewsaid:

This looks like one overconfident sailor who had planned to bring friends with modest sailing experience out for a day on the water and refused to let high, gusting winds hold him back.

They couldn't control the boat enough to keep the mainsail up in gusty winds, and if they had the boat would likely be leaning and flagging soo far over in choppy seas that the passengers would be right to be scared of the boom taking one of them out. It doesn't look like there is an outboard motor, so I guess they somehow got out of the slip and away from docks on just the jib, then hit the real wind gusts.

And now the video starts with mainsail down and getting in the way, jib not fully up but providing some pull, and that pull being lost to waves and poor steering. The sailor is messing with lines up front while the tiller is manned by someone who is waaay out of their element, and who begins to just jack-knife the thing from 0:20 onwards, halting all forward momentum. I don't want to come down on that person too hard, because none of them should have been out there that day, and the sailor should have been manning the till or at least yelling very specific orders at the top of his lungs well before the situation got this bad. No idea why they don't have an outboard motor, maybe they lost it. If its a rental, that rental agency should not have let them go out there.

(grammar edits)

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