Ooops

[AlanP]

Not a good time to lower the bridge

Duck!

[CakeBoy]

Whoops! Taxi for the bridge operator .......................

[mrcappuccino]

[mrcappuccino]

erm, that lol was for cakeys taxi comment, not the actual event

[espressomattic]

Whoops!

Hey seeing that makes all my breakages seem soooo mild!!!

[CakeBoy]

Watch out for low bridges in the wagon Breako .......... whoops - crunch, there go the blues and twos

[espressomattic]

Actually had a friend do that in a wagon...the tree won!!

[Gouezeri]

Ouch!
Thing is, it's quite likely he actually saw what was going to happen, but couldn't do anything about it quickly enough, you'd be amazed how much time (and distance) it takes to slow down a ship that size.

I saw something pretty similar a few years back in France. A family on a 45 foot sun odyssey were waiting to go though the lock at arzal which has a road bridge that runs through the middle... as the far end lock gate was being opened, the skipper put his engine into forward and proceeded to rip the backstay out of the transom, before smashing his mast into the bridge (the sound of both the boat and the crew were truly horrific). The yacht then ended up spending well over a year on shore (ironically in a yard by the side of the lock almost as a warning to others!) and was probably written off by the insurers. Essentially, all the skipper had done, was to look at the gate, rather than the bridge, and "jumped the gun," much like watching the wrong set of traffic lights on a junction.

[CakeBoy]

Terrible .... poor bloke, he must have gone through hell just thinking about it

[AlanP]

People seem to like watching boats coming into or leaving harbours and marinas.
Not for the sheer joy of seeing a craft handled well but on the off chance that something disasterous is about to happen (and very often does)
When things go well and I do some brilliant manoeuvre there's no one around but as soon as I cock it up there's an audience