Skipper crashes his boat after ditching his compass for an iPad

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iPad Pro 2
Not a replacement for compasses, apparently.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

A skipper has been fined $3,700 for crashing his 50-foot Second World War boat into a ferry — after setting off on a journey taking no compass, and only an iPad, for navigation.

The problem? The 34-year-old boatman didn’t bank on the fact that there was a chance Wi-Fi connectivity could drop out. And then it did.

When the Wi-Fi signal failed, skipper David Carlin accidentally steered his vessel, Peggotty, into the main shipping lane of the Humber Estuary during dense fog, where it collided with a cargo ferry 1,400x larger than his own vessel. At the time, Carlin was sailing his boat from Grimsby to Hull in the U.K. with a passenger. Both had to be rescued by a lifeboat.

According to a report, the skipper of the larger cargo ferry didn’t even realize what had happened due to the massive size disparity. It was conveying cargo to Gothenburg in Sweden.

Fortunately, it seems that no-one was hurt on this occasion, although it could very easily have been otherwise.

Gwen Lancaster, of the Maritime & Coastguard Agency’s Hull Marine Office, said, “I am surprised this collision, which could easily have resulted in far worse consequences, occurred in the first place.”

It’s a reminder that — no matter how much we hear about vessels like Steve Jobs’ former yacht, which was controlled using a fleet of iMacs, or the use of iPad by airlines — sometimes there’s good reason not to ditch the old technologies too soon.

No matter how good a successful journey could have looked in a future Apple ad.

Source: Daily Mail

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