Slips

Yesterday while visiting on THE WALL another boater and I were talking and he noticed I had turned the boat around in the slip and he asked me about it. The boat originally had been backed in or as we say sterned in....as opposed to pulled in or bowed in. So he and I began talking about the differences and since I had that as one of my blog topics for the future I decided to use it today. Two obvious things when you pull in..bow in..one is that it is much easier to drive a boat forward than it is to drive it backwards...same as most motorized vehicles. Two is that on our particular boat it is almost impossible to see out the back..some boats are worse than others Jeffersons are notorious. I have received two good ideas since arriving here.....a little camera on the back of the boat much like some cars have or take the back waist high walls out of the corners of the back of the boat and replace them with see through plastic glass. Both of these ideas would help us immensely. Other good reasons to bow in include the shape of the front of the boat it is made to absorb on coming waves as opposed to a flat aft or stern, you can get the dinghy down off the aft roof when bowed in, and you are supposed to start your engined and let them come up to running temperature before pulling out. Diesels put out a lot of smoke and fumes and smell if you put that out where no boats are sitting your fellow boaters will appreciate that.....people do die from carbon monoxide. I know there is a debate on whether diesels put out co or not . I tend to lean toward the affirmative on that issue. If you bow in you miss a lot of the action on the dock in front of you , but that can be a good thing. One must also consider how much sun do you want. Mrs Hines, Jan, and I like to fish off our boat in the marinas at night so we like to sit on the aft deck and fish off the back so pulling in is a good idea. My final idea is just my conjecture but I feel the boat is actually safer sterned in rather than bowed in because bowed in makes it easy for people in boats to board your boat from the water which is a sneakier way to get on your boat. There is not a lot of that going on but it does happen. We prefer bowing in. Thank you for following along Tom