Sometimes hitting the obvious isn't just done by stupid folks.
Imagine a clear full moon night, stars in the sky glittering away, the water as flat as flat can be. And I and my buddy in a 26 Tanzer sailboat, motoring into Gibsons on the Sunshine coast of BC. No problems with night vision as the full moon illuminated everything.
And I had lady luck and serendipity on my side, the rare occasion that has happened. A few years prior I had taken navigation at Fleet School in Esquimalt, a place to prepare junior officers for the Navy, watch keeping, seamanship, and all the pusser stuff. During one of the navigation lectures, the instructor talked about navigation using charts and ocean bottom as markers. This lecture was for some reason echoing in my head as I made my way to the marina in Gibson, bc.
So I looked at the chart and made a mental note of the bottom depth and decided that if the depth sounder began to go below 12 feet, I didn't know where I was. You would have thought this thinking ridiculous as Gibson is pretty obvious, so is Keats Island across from it, hard to get lost. But I clung to this notion of 12 feet, I do not know why. My buddy took over the helm and I went below to get a quick drink of pop as it had been a hot day and to relax a bit.
When I went back up, I took back the helm and looked forward at the harbour. What I didn't realize was the mast was blocking a navigation light on a rock directly in front of me. Since the water was dead calm the boat was not bouncing around and the mast hid the light. I had no idea what I was heading for.
But.......thank god.......... I looked down at the depth sounder and the bottom depth was rising quickly, very quickly, too quickly. At 8 feet, I pushed the tiller over hard realizing the situation was out of hand, even though everything appeared calm and normal.
As the boat swung around, I could have almost reached out and slapped the rock. After my heart stopped pounding so hard and I thought...thank you..thank you... thank you... that I had played the depth sounder game, I realized had we hit the rock everyone and their dog would have wondered how "that" boat hit a well marked rock with a light on it, on the perfect night. And who was skippering it?
And that some one would have been me.