NO that is not correct... have you ever piloted a boat into East Coast Fla inlets? It is not just tidal currents, but you get cross currents and wind born waves that just spring up. Boats rarely come to a full stop, usually idle speed to assess the current and the best way to get in the inlet with the current. One is busy looking forward, not backward to assess the forward situation.
Let me preface my remarks by saying that they are not meant to be mean spirited, and I add for the sake of those who feel that taking this thing apart is useless armchair speculation, that discussion regarding the incident may very well save someone else's life or property. Even if the discussion is speculation, a ton of knowledge and experience can be passed on to others who may one day find it very, very useful. While I agree that blaming has no place in this discussion, trying to understand what happened and how to avoid tragedies like this in the future does.
I don't really understand some your remarks regarding piloting East Coast inlets, and understand but believe to be dangerous others.
Here is from start to finish how I navigate Boynton Inlet in a groundswell.
The process starts before the trip with a visit to the inlet. I look at the inlet and ask myself the question "If I lose power in the middle of the surf zone, do these waves look big enough to roll my boat over?" If the answer is yes, we scrub the mission. If the answer is no, I look at the status of the tides at the times when we'll be navigating the inlet and make an educated guess at what the inlet will look like with those tide states. If my mind's eye pictures my boat rolling if I lose power then, we scrub the mission.
Now Mother Nature does not always get the memo from my mind's eye and I sometimes have found myself in a very tricky situation. A large ground sea is very dangerous if you cant keep up with the waves. Little center consoles have enough speed that they can even run parallel to the swell in the trough the whole way in. I don't have that kind of speed. My boat's good for about 17 knots with a full load. I have to ride perpendicular to the swell and in the trough. This requires that my boat fit in the trough, in other words enough space between the swells, and that I can keep up with the swell. The wave to come in behind is one that occurs just after the big set comes through. It is very, very important at this point to understand what is happening and what is about to happen as far as the groundswell is concerned.
It is to this end that I will sit idle in neutral outside of the break and try to glean information about the bottom by studying the breaking waves. What I surmise from this will determine the path over the bar that i take. After that I am constantly looking both behind me and up the beach to identify the big set. Which one it is, and how many waves are in it. Once I've figured it out, I let the set pass and throttle up. I put my bow just behind one of the next couple of waves after the set (the smallest available) clench my buttocks and power over the bar totally concentrating on staying exactly in the same place relative to the back of that small wave I'm riding behind. I am utterly unconcerned with any sort of wind chop which would be to me, be like stopping to tie your shoes so that you don't trip and fall when a freight train is barreling down on you. I traverse the bar, unclench and light a smoke once my hands stop shaking.
I'd like to think that this is how most captain's are doing it, and that this is, in fact what the sfdh captain was doing. The passenger remarked that they were idling waiting to time the set or something to that effect, which makes sense to me. It's what I would have been doing too.
The media reported that a "rogue wave" (a term which I think they used incorrectly in order to sensationalize the story) popped up out of nowhere. This also makes sense because groundswells are kinda flat, wide waves until the water gets shallow enough that they stand up. With no fly bridge it's much harder to see the big sets because you're so low that you can't see past the small ones. You don't see the big one until it's literally the next wave. It would appear to have "come from nowhere".
Because the depth that causes a wave to break is proportionate to its size, larger waves break farther from shore than smaller ones. This can cause problems, because in order to understand what's happening on the sand bar, you need to be kinda close to it. Especially if you're low to the water.
There have been more than a few times that I've been watching the break from what i thought was a safe distance, looked behind me and realized that I was about to be in a very bad spot. I had the advantage of looking out from 13 or 14 feet up in the air, and being able to see 10 or 15 waves back. If you can only see one wave back, there really aren't gonna be too many options if you find yourself in a situation like this, because by the time you realize what's up, you're already done unless you have a very fast boat.
Is this a definitive answer to what happened that day? No, not as far as I know. Could these circumstances lead to the tragic events of Thanksgiving? Absolutely, in my opinion. Is it worth discussing? I hope so.
Lastly I would like to agree with your point regarding sfdh's captain. I don't know what I would do if this had happened to me, except sit there and wish there was some way to go back and do it over, some way to make it end differently. I really feel for that guy who will live the rest of his life tormented by that day, as much as I feel for the family of the vicitim.
