Sorry for the long-ish post. Please bear with me.
The inevitable occurred; I had engine trouble. Basically, my engine was pulling any water to cool itself. It over heated after about 5 minutes and asked me to turn it off.
I couldn't have been more than a half mile from the marina, and decided that my best option was to sail as close as I could to the marina, and then switch the engine on for the final approach into my slip. I did this under the jib alone.
As I approached the opening to the marina, everything could not have been smoother. Wind was a steady 5 knots. My speed was about 1.5 - 2 knots. I decided to keep going and was able to pull right up to my slip, turn on my engine, and back in.
About a minute after tying off, a dock worker comes up to me and tells me to "never, ever do anything like that again." His reasoning was that a "gust of wind could have come and blew me into one of the very expensive boats." I told him I had engine trouble, and he said, "then you call us to get towed in."
So my question is, is this a common thing for marinas to have a rule that you cannot come into the marina under sail power? I have read a good number of articles that suggest that people actually practice doing this in case of emergency.
The inevitable occurred; I had engine trouble. Basically, my engine was pulling any water to cool itself. It over heated after about 5 minutes and asked me to turn it off.
I couldn't have been more than a half mile from the marina, and decided that my best option was to sail as close as I could to the marina, and then switch the engine on for the final approach into my slip. I did this under the jib alone.
As I approached the opening to the marina, everything could not have been smoother. Wind was a steady 5 knots. My speed was about 1.5 - 2 knots. I decided to keep going and was able to pull right up to my slip, turn on my engine, and back in.
About a minute after tying off, a dock worker comes up to me and tells me to "never, ever do anything like that again." His reasoning was that a "gust of wind could have come and blew me into one of the very expensive boats." I told him I had engine trouble, and he said, "then you call us to get towed in."
So my question is, is this a common thing for marinas to have a rule that you cannot come into the marina under sail power? I have read a good number of articles that suggest that people actually practice doing this in case of emergency.