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Comment by paddy_m | Hacker News Reader

I would tend to think so. The pilot should have anticipated prop walk and known that the ship had no chance of stopping before the bridge.

I’m trying to find a color coded current map. Wind too. I wouldn’t expect wind or current to cause the pronounced heading change that is visible. The drift seems possible.

Note: I’m an experienced dinghy/keelboat sailor, but lack virtually any experience driving boats under power, much less commercial vessels

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It seems the excellent windy.com has wind and current data from the incident still available. Looks like current was <0.2 kts and wind was 6 kts south-east. So both should be completely negligible.

Checks out.

.2knots/hour = 405 yards/hour

It was 4 minutes from power loss to impact.

405 yards/15 = 27 yards. And that's if the ship instantly accelerated to a 0.2 kt drift, which it wouldn't. Wind acceleration on the vessel than current.

yeah, noted. But it does seem like the heading change was so dramatic and the smoke pouring out after power recovery that something happened with the prop. And while it may have been currents, the lack of heading change before the smoke seems to suggest there was an intervention that caused heading change.

Ship travel, much like orbital mechanics, are so often non-intuitive if you're not familiar with how much effort it takes to make significant speed changes vs. heading changes. And speed changes often affect the heading as well if you're not careful.

For some reason, I thought that large vessels hired a local pilot to navigate their way through places like this.

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