Reddit can be a useful knowledge base, but there are certain subject areas where the consensus voice will confidently, clearly, emphatically state something that is simply wrong.
My current irritation is r/sailing, which has a large number of people who have clearly never sailed beyond the yacht club bar, or maybe a small lake, and have precisely zero clue about the interplay between wind and current (because they never experience the latter), spouting off bullshit with authority.
And there’s no point arguing with them, but my god, the extent to which they are smug about being wrong is irritating as fuck.
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Dr David Mills
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Deleted the thread and will post as an article to my own website instead.
What you get for trying to help.
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SaraMG
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Most of my sailing is on Lake Michigan which, while a great lake, is still just a lake.
First time I dropped into the Florida current I had a real eye opener. Absolutely took off with me.
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Sarah Brown
in reply to SaraMG • •SaraMG
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to SaraMG • •@SaraMG You time your arrival for the current conditions to be amenable. Getting this stuff right is a big part of RYA sailing courses.
In duress, you can burn diesel (the ebb through Portsmouth harbour’s entrance can be a bugger, but that’s only a few hundred metres), or you can drop a hook and wait for the tide to turn or slacken.
SaraMG
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Oh sure, when all goes to plan I'm sure it's fine, it's more the "in duress" part of your reply I was looking for and... yeah, sounds like about what I'd end up doing.
Could you imagine mistiming the tides though? One minute you're up to your keel in mud, the next you're trudging through it, waist deep, clawing towards the shore... how could that even happen? ;)
Sarah Brown
in reply to SaraMG • •Zoë O'Connell
in reply to SaraMG • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Zoë O'Connell • •SaraMG
in reply to Zoë O'Connell • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to SaraMG • • •SaraMG
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to SaraMG • • •SaraMG
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Zoë O'Connell
in reply to SaraMG • • •@saramg @ajlanes @thelocalecho Oh, the incident with Sara was *worse*. Far worse. Think "Oh my gods, are we going to end up on the Nine O'Clock news as tragic deaths at rural town".
We learnt our lesson.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Zoë O'Connell • • •SaraMG
in reply to Zoë O'Connell • • •@zoe @thelocalecho Ahem. Type. Two. Fun.
It's one of my favorite near-death experiences with you lot.
@ajlanes Yes, there are other near-death stories.
And they laughed when I joked about being left for dead in the desert...
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to SaraMG • • •SaraMG
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to SaraMG • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •SaraMG
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Zoë O'Connell
in reply to SaraMG • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Zoë O'Connell
in reply to SaraMG • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Zoë O'Connell • •Zoë O'Connell
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.
d a t green
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •like this
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Kyozou
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Kyozou • •@Kyozou They’re upset that wind instruments calculate true wind by subtracting the boat’s speed from the apparent wind.
Apparently they want ground wind instead, because they’re fucking idiots.
Kyozou
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •raymarine.custhelp.com/app/ans…
Apparent Wind, True Wind and Ground Wind, and data required to calculate them
raymarine.custhelp.comSarah Brown
in reply to Kyozou • •@Kyozou I gave them that link. Their conclusion was that Raymarine, the people who make the instruments on their boats, “don’t know what they’re talking about”.
Honestly, there needs to be a simple slap delivery protocol.
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •@Kyozou Oh, and it gets better: “they’re only saying this because GPS isn’t accurate enough to give a good enough speed to calculate what the wind is really doing”
NOBODY CARES ABOUT GROUND WIND. IT ISN’T CALCULATED BECAUSE IT ISN’T USEFUL.
Kyozou
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Piers Cawley My favourite one was approaching Dover harbour once. Dover is where the tide race for Great Britain meets. As a result the tide tables can be … aspirational.
On this one day, it was wrong. The water was meant to be 1st behind us. It was 2-3kts in front instead. Traffic control was trying to slot us in between a couple of Dover Calais ferries (bloody big fuckers), and was getting frustrated watching us on AIS approaching at barely 3 knots.
“Scarlet scarlet, Dover Dover, is that your best speed? Over”
“Dover, Scarlet, unfortunately it is. Sorry. Over”
Meanwhile the poor engine was screaming.
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Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Piers Cawley oh, cool! What were you sailing? Some sort of bilge keeler? Bridlington is quite shallow, isn’t it?
My boat currently lives in Portsmouth harbour. The Solent isn’t so bad. Watch the tides, especially around the Needles channel. Wind gets weird around Southampton water in a south westerly. Stay out of the shipping channels in the eastern Solent, and beware the ferries, because half of them are piloted by the marine equivalent of white van man.
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Gen X-Wing
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •There’s a lot of big subreddits specifically dedicated to being vile and wrong, and then smug about it. 🙁
Wish there were an alternative (I’ve pretty much stopped using it) but my kbin experience was a resounding flop. I check it maybe once a week and each time I ask myself “why did I bother?”:(
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •