diesel engine maintenance and powerboat seamanship 169
DISCONNECTING SHORE POWER FOR GETTING
UNDERWAY
- Go dead ship. Tu r n o ff lights, nav equipment, and all accessories at the
power panel. Check all power panels in the cabin and topside. Shut off the
black or white rocker (breaker) switches last. - Remove shoreside plug. Ask the dockmaster to secure the power
momentarily. If shoreside power cannot be secured, you can nevertheless
pull out the plug from the shoreside receptacle. - Remove boat plug; coil and stow. Remove the plug on the boat. Screw the
receptacle cover plate back over the receptacle. Coil and stow the shore-
power cord in a dry area. - Start engines and energize power. Start the generator and engines. Turn on
the main rocker switches fi rst, then the accessory switches. Finally, turn on
lights and navigation equipment.
Wake Control and Emergency Wake Breaking
Th ere’s nothing fun about fi ghting to stay inside a channel aft er being waked by
a boneheaded skipper. Th is problem, however, is not going away anytime soon.
Professional and recreational skippers have a responsibility to set the example.
First off , you are solely responsible for controlling your wake. You are respon-
sible for any wake damage to vessels that are underway, at anchor, or moored.
In the worst case, a person could end up falling overboard.
Most of us who operate power vessels have found ourselves faced with this
dilemma: do I slow down or do I keep going? When I was a Coast Guard coxswain,
no judgment was allowed; I was obligated to slow down near others, no matter
what. We’d slow down to clear one group of vessels, then ramp up our speed for a
while, slow down to clear another group, and then ramp it up again. Doing that
only cost a few seconds and never impacted the outcome of our operations. Safety
fi rst—always.
WAKE CONTROL 101
Use your own boat’s LOA (length overall) to determine when you should slow
down to a minimum wake or to no wake at all. Follow these guidelines.
Slow down to minimum wake (10 ë LOA). Displacement and semidis-
placement power vessels tend to churn up the water astern. Slow to minimum
wake when you are at a distance that is ten times your boat length (ten boat
lengths) from another vessel. For example, if your boat is 20 feet long, slow down
when you are within 200 feet of another boat. If you’re 50 feet, slow when within
500 feet of another boat. Planing vessel skippers must use their discretion, since
these vessels tend to throw larger wakes at displacement speeds than when up