Tragic accident and prayers for the missing sailors...but how could this happen..?? Was wondering if Navy ships are piloted in to port...:-k

Definitely not what the military needs right now.

The great gitchiegoomie?

Prolly not a good name for a ship... 😟

Poor Ed.

I heard Victor caught the gitchiegoomie... 😟

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind…

Depends. But you wouldn't have a harbor pilot on board 56 Nm out. Typically they come aboard only a few miles out, if that. This was an costal water collision.

Wondered about that.. didn't have that info in the article I read...😟

Yeah, I can see how articles can be different. I read the BBC article.

And to clarify, 56Nm out is from the port of Yokosuka. They were a few Nm off the nearest shoreline, but that's just coastal operation water. It's not quite restricted and needing a pilot under normal circumstances, but it's heavily congested waters. These are big machines, everything happens in slow motion. Just to give you an idea, I've served on vessels the size of the container ship that hit the Fitzgerald, it would take us a few miles to make a Williamson turn at 10 kts. That's 30+ minutes to come back around on our own track to where we started the manuver. That long, that heavy, we don't stop fast, nor turn that quick. Would take us 3-4 Nm to just to come to an emergency dead stop from full ahead (and that's with the engines running full astern and shaking the ship to pieces the whole time).

So you guys hit the Fitzgerald too..?? 😕

^^And... because the larger vessels are slower and less maneuverable, they are almost always given right of way. In congested waters like that, they should have been talking to one another from miles away asking for heading and intentions.

"Hey, I see you're headed on (numerical compass point), we're headed (numerical compass point), which will cause us to intersect... what are your plans?" and stuff...

Sécurité, sécurité, sécurité...

This was a miscommunication of colossal proportions.

A combatant has every advantage save one, they are faster, more maneuverable and better armed, but no modern combatant short of a carrier can survive a collision with a merchant.

It would be like you trying to take a punch to the face from Sonny Liston.

that's stupid. Liston's been dead for years.

MACS told me frank looks like he was punched in the face by Sonny Liston

he's a big fat liar...or you are.

I was gonna ask, "in his prime, or now".



I'll let you decide which. I'm sure you'll choose correctly.

tw is a big fat liar

😱

😱