Depth Problems
Last week was a beautiful sail. The fog never did roll in enough to make visibility questionable for the race course.
We did, however, have to deal with depth gauge issues and two large freighters being pushed and pulled by tugs. One freighter/tug passed us, and it was looking like we’d have time to cross over the channel before the second one was upon us. All of the sudden, the depth meter started showing it shallow underneath us. It went quickly from 30-something feet to 6-8′. The maps didn’t show any shoaling there, but we tacked, just to be safe. Then, of course, we had to wait for the other ship to go past before we crossed the channel.
Then there was the mark we were heading to: Godwin Thoroughfare. It’s shallow around it, and gets very shallow near shore. So when we were showing 6′ of water, we tacked to try for a closer approach. This time, we again showed it shallow, but we were closer to the mark, so we took it around, without any problem. Guess the earlier tack, in this case wasn’t warranted.
I talked with someone at work about our first problem. He said that when there was alot of turbulence from big ships, it could change the density of the water and play havoc with depth sounders. So my question to the more experienced on this list: is that true? Have you ever seen that?
On the second point, I did find that the depth near the shore around the Godwin Thoroughfare mark does get down to 3′ quite quickly. So I’m still glad we made the extra tack.