Those boats in Texas paraded at the wrong speed
Alphaville does not have an opinion on the political effectiveness of boat parades. Putting a Trump flag in a rod holder and motoring around on the weekend isn’t any sillier than putting a sticker on a car bumper and driving to work during the week. And the Trump flags are, legally, bumper stickers. They represent what the Coast Guard would call a “private signal,” since they’re neither a national ensign or a yacht club pennant, which are used to show origin.
Flags, like hats and bumper stickers and any other private signals, are inherently confrontational. If they heave into view, you cannot avoid them by clicking away. There’s no political science on boat parades yet, but yard signs, for example, do have an effect on the margins if a candidate is already advertising.
Alphaville does, however, have an opinion on how to run a political boat parade: at either very high or very low speeds, in open water, and not in single file. The Trump boat parade on Saturday in Texas failed to do these things, and ended up fighting an opponent more formidable than any Democrat: physics.
On Saturday, inspired by a Facebook page that’s since been deleted, several hundred Republican skippers launched their boats in Lake Travis, a reservoir on the Colorado River just north-west of Austin. According to ABC News, the page instructed boats to meet at Emerald Point at 11:30am, motor about eight miles to Point Venture, then return. (This is similar to instructions also posted to nextdoor.)
At 12:15, the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, which was already standing by for the event, began responding to the first of fifteen distress calls from boaters. Boats were taking on water. Engines had stalled. Some boats had turned right over. Private towing companies responded to calls, too. By the end of the event, five boats were on the bottom of Lake Travis. No one was injured.
The sheriff’s office offered a straightforward explanation: “When the large number of boats began moving together, the wakes generated large waves in areas where participating boats were dense.” Alphaville has no reason to doubt the office, which even has a dedicated Lake Patrol unit.
But we would like to complement what the office reported. It wasn’t just the number of boats on Lake Travis that generated all those distress calls. It was the type of boat, the speed at which they moved, and the way they planned their route.....MUCH MORE
Trump voters seem to buy boats with planing hulls
In August, Joel Stein in the Los Angeles Times distinguished between an “intellectual elite” and what he called a “boat elite,” a group that is “tough, loyal, hardworking, tribal, traditional and focused on wealth. They are so reckless that as soon as they make the most expensive purchase of their lives, they smash a bottle of champagne against it.”
This is propwash. You do have to be some kind of elite to have room on your balance sheet for a boat. But what Mr Stein failed to recognise is that different elites buy different kinds of boats for different activities. Allow us to offer a simple model:....
Do follow the link for the rest of the story and some fairly sharp reader comments but come back and see how wakes and waves can be used for good (if the skipper knows how to drive the boat*)
Here the guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg interdicts and disables a skiff with some Somali pirates aboard, no injuries on either side but some mighty fancy driving by the Gettysburg:
Previously at Alphaville-sur-Mer:
In Which FT Alphaville Takes On Sailing Yachts, Admiralty (Maritime) Law, and Dinghy Davits
If interested see also: Hull Form
