Screen shot by Roger Long
Screen shot by Roger Long
Figure 2: This shows how Whitehead Passage looks on the GPS I’d come to trust so much. At a marine-supply store, all the chart plotters I looked at showed the passage the same way.
Figure 2a: This screen shows the area around the beacon zoomed in close. This was really an eye-opener for me. If I’d been navigating in a strange area, I would have thought that I could pass this mark pretty closely.
“Saturday afternoon, Oct. 13, 2007: Entering Whitehead Passage under sail and power, draft 9 feet with 1.5 feet of tide no swell contacted ‘ground?’ in an area showing near 29 feet MLW on the chart. We were in the marked channel approximately 40 feet N of Spire G ‘3’. Spire G ‘3’ is located on the 15-foot depth contour. We transit this area on a regular basis and have checked GPS track lines of the vessel, and had a
visual on the spire and the Nun ‘6’ at the time of contact. Commercial sailing vessels with passengers for hire of similar draft use this passage on a regular basis. There is a significant discrepancy. Presuming the tidal data is accurate, this contact would calculate about 7 feet of depth at MLW for that location. I hired a diver to take a look at the obstruction, and it is a sharp spine with numerous bruises from impact with
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