By Shirley Howland
It is unbelievable that the Dinius/Perdock case is still being discussed with such ignorance, regarding the differences between powerboats and sailboats. Nothing has been said about the wind that night, but usually there is very little on the lake after dark; and a sailboat has very little maneuverability in light winds. That is why sailboats have the right-of-way over powerboats, according to International Laws of the Sea and Inland Waterways. In a good breeze they can move at about 3 to 5 mph, so there wasn”t much Dinius could have done to avoid the collision, whether or not he was cold-sober or swinging from the rigging.
The running lights on a sailboat are not very bright and the stern lights, at least on my 25-foot boat that I sailed on San Francisco Bay for many years, were only about two inches in diameter. When I sailed at night I usually had a flashlight to shine up on the sails when I heard a power boat in the vicinity. And having the cabin lights on helped me be seen too. The running lights blended in with the lights from the shore and you have to be standing still or moving very slowly to be able to discern whether the little red and green lights you see are actually on a boat or not. Powerboats are easier to see because their lights are much brighter and move much faster and usually are accompanied by a lot of noise. As for seeing whether the lights are on or not, when you”re aboard a sailboat you cannot see them on either the bow or stern unless you lean over the side ? something Dinius probably didn”t do; his only fault.
The obvious fault and clear violation of the law was Perdock”s. His boat was overtaking the sailboat, and again the law of the sea is that overtaking vessels stand clear. In fact, overtaking vehicles on land are supposed to stay clear too, aren”t they? His excuse is that he couldn”t see the sailboat? He was approaching from behind, his bow was up in the air blocking his immediate vision ahead and he was traveling at a speed that made it difficult to distinguish how far away or close the lights he may have seen were.
According to Hopkins, the judges declared that “the speed of the motorboat was reasonably forseeable” for traveling on Clear Lake at night … I”m not sure what “reasonably foreseeable” means but I am sure that when a speedboat is going fast enough to lift it”s bow up over the transom of another boat and climb into the cockpit, traveling 9 or 10 feet to smash into the cabin and kill one of the passengers, it is going too fast. There is no speed limit on the lake, but like any vehicle, under limiting conditions, like darkness, one should drive no faster than is safe. Clearly if a boat is traveling fast enough to lift the bow out of the water, the driver”s vision is even more limited. Maybe Perdock had not been drinking, but nevertheless, he was guilty of breaking at least two laws, maybe three, which caused a death: not giving a sailboat the right of way, being the overtaking vessel, and driving at an unsafe speed.
Shirley Howland
Clearlake
