Posted by The Cruising Club of America (CCA) is a collection of 1,400 ocean sailors with extensive offshore seamanship, command experience, and a shared passion for making adventurous use of the seas. Their experiences and expertise make them, collectively, one of the most reliable sources of information on offshore sailing. In partnership with SAIL, the CCA is sharing some of this hard-won know-how in
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This story was shared with CCA member Brian Guck by a friend in Pulpit Harbor, Maine. The author, an experienced sailor and mountaineer, had just returned from a successful trip to the summit of Mt. Everest. He wished to remain anonymous but still pass along what he learned from this incident.
I hopped into our motor dinghy and headed out to the boat to do some routine chores. Once completed, I got back in the dinghy and headed back to the dock.
It was low tide. I needed to navigate shallow water to get to my usual tie up spot. I did what I frequently do in this situation, turning around to lift the idling motor into the shallow water setting. The new motor we bought this year doesn’t raise and lower quite as easily as our old one did, so I had to jiggle the motor to get it to lock into position. As I did this, the motor tiller brushed the side of the dinghy and jerked into full throttle. The dinghy surged forward, then swerved violently to starboard. I was thrown from the dinghy into the shallow water.
Outboard motors are sold with emergency cutoff switches, commonly called kill switches. These are stretchy rubber lanyards intended to be worn around the operator’s wrist, with the other end connected to a switch on the motor. If the operator is inadvertently thrown into the water, the lanyard pulls the switch and immediately shuts off the motor.
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