Steering 2

Marathon
No LL

Once again, this post is for the benefit of our non-boating friends.

I presume that all of us are completely familiar with the task of steering a car or a bicycle using the front wheels. It seems completely natural.



When making a sharp turn around a corner, the rear wheels track closer to the corner than the front wheels (see above). Trucks and busses must avoid running over the curb with the rear wheels.

A boat uses a rudder to steer from the rear. Since rear-wheel-steering cars are very rare, we have little or no experience with that. When you turn a sharp corner with a rear wheeled car, the back of the corner swings out away from the curb and makes a wider turn than the front. This can be a problem for novice boaters.




One day in Titusville, Florida I witnessed an incident similar to that shown in the picture below. A boat came in to the marina and he wanted to pull in to an empty slip on his right. To allow himself plenty of room to make the turn, he came in close to the boats on the left. He was thinking like a car driver. He wound up crashing in to a number of the boats on his left.
An experienced skipper would have know that a boat in the position of the green boat shown above is doomed. There is no way to steer to avoid crashing from that position, except perhaps to back out. If he stops or slows down, the wind and waves will push him in. The only way to avoid crashing in this situation would be to enter the corridor more to the right.