It does not matter who is in the right if you make other people angry. What causes problems is that some sailors think sailing vessels always have right-of-way over powerboats, which is not always true, (please imagine here a cartoon of a sailboat hailing "starboard" to a cruise ship). Just an exaggeration, but we were at a regatta once at Muskegon, Michigan and all the sailboats were berthed inside the bay and had to tack out through a pretty narrow channel to get out to Lake Michigan for the races. This was extremely annoying to the powerboaters trying to come in through that same channel, wearing out their transmissions trying to stop, back up, whatever, to avoid these erratic sailboats. And some of them were as nasty to us as we are to Waverunners and threatened to just run us over. And we, of course, were angry at them for their barge-on-through, big-boat-has-right-of-way attitudes. (But in a lot of cases the "big boats" are right.)



All this is totally off the thread of the original post. I think it would be good to have a thread about this whole subject of the problems of powerboats and PWC's vis-a-vis sailboats. More education is needed for both sailboaters and powerboaters, concerning the problems and needs of both.