Perdido Pass boat accident

[cinegamma]

More likely than not, it seems the phrases "No one aboard was wearing a PFD" or "Alcohol might have been a factor" are always included in news reports like this.

http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2016/06/four_injured_in_boat_crash_at.html#incart_river_mobile_home_pop

[Masbama]

Think it's the third one down this way so far this year. They also happened at night.

[Jefecinco]

I think it's the third this month. One was, I believe, a double fatality in Oyster Bay on the ICW between Mobile Bay and Gulf Shores. All are expected to recover from injuries received during the Perdido Pass accident.

The jetty which was struck and mounted is the site of frequent accidents during times of low visibility. The jetty is clearly marked on charts, paper and otherwise. Still, professional captains of large yachts have struck that jetty.

[jimh]

Perhaps the photograph taken by another mariner of the boat that struck the harbor entrance jetty--or should I say huge pile of very large rocks--will illustrate to readers what actually happened:

View of Perdito Pass entrance jetty from seaward; photo by PARADISE MARINE

world-cat-aground-at-perdido-pass-courtesy-paradise-marinejpg-e5e7619989adee01.jpg (56 KiB) Viewed 4790 times

We spent a week staying at a rental condominium very close by Perdito Pass and transited through that entrance several times. I guess we never "lost situational awareness" and somehow avoided striking the jetty.

[Masbama]

Place has become a horrible mess. People with more money than sense. Can be like a busy interstate of boats. I avoid it.
Was wonderful 20 years ago.

[jimh]

When we visited Orange Beach, Alabama, several years ago, I was expecting to find a sleepy little harbor town, with residents that were a bunch of hayseed locals. I was quite surprised at the collection of wealth accumulating there in the form of very fancy, very big, very expensive, very impressive yachts, particularly a bunch of 70 to 80-foot sport fishing yachts that apparently would need to run 50-miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico to find suitably large fish to pursue with a boat of that size. We were there in what the locals considered the winter and the off-season, so we did not find many other boats underway. I can imagine that in Summer and peak boating season it could get a bit crowded there.