psneeld
Guru
If you are really worried about grounding, choose a safe navigational depth for each stretch of your trip so that no way you will hit bottom as most of us are navigating with charts and not the depth sounder.
If you are in water where less than two feet matters, you better be going extremely slow or you will ground anyway or still pop that rock ledge/random rock that isn't charted well. Which probably we all do when poking around looking to anchor or enter known shallow areas like silted in marinas.
14 years of professionally ungrounding boats, I have heard a lot of stories from embarrassed skippers and they probably were mixed on what method of offset they used.
So while I have my method, and the other is OK with me...I just think it doesn't matter as good nav skills and situational awareness are far more critical. They are way more important than worrying about what should be a near instantaneous decision to slow/stop when the depth sounder gets near a number you should already have in your head long before it's really needed.
If you are in water where less than two feet matters, you better be going extremely slow or you will ground anyway or still pop that rock ledge/random rock that isn't charted well. Which probably we all do when poking around looking to anchor or enter known shallow areas like silted in marinas.
14 years of professionally ungrounding boats, I have heard a lot of stories from embarrassed skippers and they probably were mixed on what method of offset they used.
So while I have my method, and the other is OK with me...I just think it doesn't matter as good nav skills and situational awareness are far more critical. They are way more important than worrying about what should be a near instantaneous decision to slow/stop when the depth sounder gets near a number you should already have in your head long before it's really needed.
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