How Quickly Can You Dock Your Boat? Not As Fast As These Guys!
It seems to be in our nature as humans to make anything we do regularly into a competition. From driving to cooking to styling hair or stacking plastic cups and even drag racing horses, everywhere you look you’ll see the world championship of some obscure thing. In the video below, you’ll find some footage of a contest that, as is mentioned in the video, likely started as a wager between two guys one afternoon that has turned into a full blown weekend competition with cash and prizes awarded to the individuals and couples who manage to dock their boat the fastest!
The premise is simple, and these guys certainly make it look effortless, but let me assure you, parking a boat of any size this fast takes years of experience. I know a lot of you, especially anybody out there who’s never driven a boat, are thinking “How hard can it be to back a boat between two rows of pylons and toss some hoops over them?”
To actually do it isn’t that hard, I’ll give you that. You can jump on a boat and grab the wheel and the throttle and probably learn to dock it successfully in an hour or so. However, to do it in around 30 seconds, which seems to be a good target time for these teams, is a completely different ballgame. Trust me when I tell you, these guys and gals have been practicing their technique and shaving a little bit off their time for months, if not years, preparing for this competition.
One factor that definitely helps is the boats, designed specifically for fishing offshore for large fish, have a set of controls mounted outside of the cabin, where the captain can get a full view of what’s going on without taking his hands off the wheel or the throttle. This affords him or her a supreme level of control and visibility, allowing them to maneuver the boats into place with zero wasted movement. Couple that with the large hoops that make it easier to wrangle the pylons and keep the boat in place, and you have everything you need to park a boat in record time.
