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
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
5 responses to “Skipper crashes his boat after ditching his compass for an iPad”
“When the Wi-Fi signal failed, — First Mate Gilligan — 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.”
There. Fixed the story for you. :D
Sounds to me he decided to save the $130 by getting the wifi only version.
I was thinking the same thing. Wi-Fi shouldn’t be required for navigation, unless you didn’t get a GPS enabled iPad and an offline maps app.
Sorry, I don’t buy this story (excuse) for a second. I, along with a bunch of my friends, all have boats we use for fishing (I’m from Vancouver, Canada). A couple things:
– We all use various software on our iPhones or iPads for navigation. But we also download to our devices because you don’t have a signal when you’re out in the water.
– Any competent boater would also have paper backup charts. And a compass, which should be standard equipment attached to your vessel, not something you just “bring along” or forget.
– Only an idiot would take a small vessel out in dense fog. The potential for accidents is very high.
Sounds like this guy wants to throw blame towards his iPad when he made several other errors that set up this dangerous situation.
First – Compass/GPS works independently of Wifi, while you can lose your map data without wifi, the cached map data would show orientation/direction on the water.
Second – Boating is similar to IT, when your primary method fails, bring out the backup (real compass, paper maps/charts, etc.) Then the backup to the backup, with the compass and heading indicator built-in to the boat’s nav console.
Third – don’t go out in fog/reduced visibility, that’s just stupid.