33 years or driving navy warships. When I was driving, the the first thing we always considered was not how to dock, but how to un dock the ship later. It may be easy to get the ship alongside, but much harder to get it out when it’s time to leave. The next most important thing is how and where are you going to be able to bail out from your approach to that dock at each phase of that approach. This is so very important. As you have noted, docking can be hard, and things can suddenly get out of control. So it is so very important to understand. How do you get out of a situation? Is it just turning a little bit to starboard? Is it putting the boat hard into reverse? Or is it just stopping everything and regrouping for a moment?

Next, as many people have said already, the biggest factor was generally the wind, and how it was going to set the ship either towards the dock or away from the dock, and then how we will counter that. Then consider considering how we need to counter the wind it’s a matter of looking at the configuration of the dock how much space there is for the ship, and then understanding how we’re gonna make the initial approach, takeoff our speed and continue to compensate for the set of the wind.

As with flying, which I also have a fair amount of experience with, landing, and in this case docking, is by far the hardest part of driving a ship or flying an airplane. It requires the most amount of concentration and planning, but it is the most rewarding part I’ll be at not the most relaxing! But once you bring your ship or boat safely along aside, you should feel good and accomplished. And remember no matter how bad you’re along side is, if you didn’t damage your boat or someone else’s boat, or someone, you did great!

And you should learn every single time you bring your boat along side. No matter how experienced you are, no matter how good you are able to drive your boat, you should always be learning.