Imagine reading a book about fucking shipping containers! lmao
j/k you do you
Iām a boat captain and the amount of skill involved in navigating those massive boats through that channel is off the charts. Not sure Iād have the cajones to do that. My butthole puckered up pretty good when I had to drive a small ferry under a bridge with only a few inches clearance on each side and above, scraped the shit out of my antenna and I almost hit the sides.
Those guys do the equivalent of 10000x that and the consequences of messing up are millions of dollars and potentially human lives.
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You must be a scream at parties.
Kink shaming itt.
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Most of the pressure was on the pilot (who works for the Canal) on the boat I was on. He told the captain everything to do. We were lashed to two other small boats so really only the captain in the middle boat was even steering. Each boat had itās own pilot who was on the boat all the way through the locks.
On our boat the only two stressful jobs were manning the lines on our non-lashed side. When the water goes up or down you have to pull in/let out the lines. Our boat was a French couple, their father, and us two volunteers. We kept trying to get them to let us do the lines since we were bigger and stronger than the wife and āpapahā. The husband had to man the tiller. But it was their boat so they wanted to do it. Both wound up with injuries on their hands. Worst case scenario a line gets too tight and sends a cleat flying at deadly projectile speed.
We had a big boat in front of us on our trip up the locks and a different big boat behind us on our trip back down at the end. On the big boats something like 60 line-handlers get on to attach all the steel cables and man the secondary ropes or something. I think on those all the pressure is on the guy directing the little rail cars. We could hear them over the radio and it sounded a little tense when one of the cars wasnāt listening. And those arenāt even the Supermax - we all went through the old locks, which are smaller. It costs the Supermax boats over $1M to go through.
The pilots are amazing - theyāre like ambassadors for the canal - full of interesting facts.
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Handling lines is actually really dangerous. Especially steel lines ( i think theyāre called cables actually, Iām really rusty on my boat knowledge). If those get loose or snap they are totally capable of decapitating you. Even rope lines are super dangerous - if they get caught around your hand, you are definitely losing fingers or even your whole hand. Iāve seen a guy lose 2 fingers once (luckily not under my command).
One of the things that would make me absolutely go batshit on someone was seeing a deckhand mishandle lines. Itās so fucking dangerous. And yea, the cleat thing is totally common. Iāve seen it happen too and ever since then I would pucker up every time I was cleating the lines on a bigger boat.
That exact situation happened on the Columbia in Disneyland about 20 years ago, and the cleat basically wiped the face off of some canadian tourist.
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The parties I go to knowing things about the world is not a hinderance. 
Reminds me of this New Yorker article on pilots in the NY/NJ area (I never knew there was such a thing as a boat pilot who would come in and take over from the captain for a difficult stretch):
Clashing tides from two directions meet beneath the bridge, and soon after a ship goes under it the pilot must finesse the turn of a hundred and twenty-seven degrees into Newark Bay; meanwhile, Staten Islandās shoreline, close by on the left, narrowly confines the shipās stern. The maneuver is like carrying a dining-room table through a bedroom door while stepping on slippery carpets. In fact, these thousand-plus yards of the K.V.K. may be the trickiest passage in any major port in the world.
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Itās kind of like, what you learn in college is not always applicable (and often not at all) in the field you end up in. I drove a small, wooden auto ferry that never left an 800 foot stretch of channel. Most of the stuff I learned in captain school is not applicable in that domain, and thus forgotten.
I remember all the most important stuff - weather, navigation, rules of the road. I get tested on that every 5 years.
Plus, Iāve been a software engineer for the last 2 years, so thereās even more fading of my memory there. Weird career path, I know.
Itās funny because the pilot taught us the exact correct upside down figure 8 to do. I used to own a sailboat so I remembered but the refresher was good. Me and the other volunteer practiced a ton and were fine.
But the seasoned boat people kept screwing up and either getting it stuck, or not looping it enough to stop the line from slowly pulling out. Under pressure they were reverting back to their normal relaxed tie off to the dock knot.
Lol are you talking about a cleat hitch?
One of the easiest knots to tie. If all else fails you can just add like 5 loops to the knot and that thing isnt going anywhere. Hard to imagine anyone seasoned fucking that up, lol
I think they would stop at step 3 - because they knew they need to let out line soon and they thought that was good. But the problem is if the boats start drifting left, it gets pulled tight and the knot doesnāt hold. Then theyāre pulling with all their might on the other end of the line to get it to hold in the knot.
How to go from global poverty rates to knot tying methods in 20 moves or less.
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stop this kink-shaming!
Your pony is asleep today
Someone needs to mail a copy of this to Mayor Cheat
Ohoh, I guess that means I rode it without proper consent.