Damn Yachts.
Here’s the story. Joe Trillo, who used to be a Republican but is now an Independent, likes to give campaign parties on his 65-foot yacht, the Lady M. I think the M stands for Mendacious.
Joe is running for the Governor of Rhode Island. Yesterday, he was running his yacht along the coastline with large campaign banners, blasting loud Sousa music.
His strategy was to approach a beach and announce that if elected, one of the many things he would do is put garbage cans on beaches so beachgoers wouldn’t have to carry their trash out in plastic bags. He’d play a John Philip Sousa march on what he describes as “very, very big sound equipment” before leaving for the next beach.
“You can hit 200,000 to 250,000 people in a day,” he said. “How else can you do that without spending a lot of money?”
I want you to listen to the news for five minutes and then tell me that the biggest problem facing the world today is beach goers having to carry out their own trash.
So he’s rocking along the coast in the full glory aboard the Lady M when he hits what was described as a “rock” and started taking on water. The Coast Guard had to come rescue him. Do you know who pays the Coast Guard?
I am comfortable in my belief that he didn’t hit a rock; he hit a wall of stupidity.
Joe says that President Donald Trump inspired his gubernatorial run.
Really. He said that. Like we couldn’t figure that out on our own.
Thanks to Claudia for the heads up.
Hey Joe Trillo!
If your boat hits a rock and starts to sink – – take it as a sign, a harbinger for the future of your campaign. Sinking.
(cue Nearer My God To Thee) (Yes, a Titanic reference)
1“Dumber than a box of rocks”? Pshaw, it only took one rock smarter than Joe to take him down.
2Hell, I’ll support his campaign, if it will drew off some potential Repug votes.
No trash receptacles on the beaches? That there is your archetypal First World Problem. Along with your day at the beach being ruined by some entitled twit blaring obnoxious music and slogans, of course.
3You can damn his yacht for not sinking fast enough. Now can we get the producers of The Sopranos to sue this dribblewit for copyright infringement ??
4A while back, a local car dealer used a horse in his ad campaign to help sell his cars. He gallops up to the camera in a cloud of dust and in cowboy hat bigger than he is and declares: “We ain’t just horsin’ around!”
Thre’s probably a pretty good tax write off for hobbies contorted into business expenses. Horses, yachts, vacations…
5Poor Joe! He is a captive of his yacht. I’ve been on a yacht before. One thing they most vaingloriously have is one helluva bar for entertainment, even if you are all by your lonesome self. You can get as likened up as you want and run your keel into the sandy bottom just off a beach and yell whatever you want to any damn reason. So his birthday present to himself hit a rock! Wow! Of course, he will get it repaired and get right back on a watery track making a freaking nuisance of himself. What he hasn’t figured on is the 10 year old on the beach with a slingshot and his choice of rock. Damn! There goes the window on the bridge! Oh, man! there goes one of the windows in the solarium . . .
6montag, thank you for the term “dribblewit,” which I am immediately stealing and will have many occasions to use.
Even in relatively sane New England, there’s someone to put the “goober” in gubernatorial.
7I think he meant he was running as an “Idiot”
8Yeah, well, if he’s blasting Sousa marches on a public beach, he ought to be arrested for making a public nuisance. Nothing ruins a good day at the beach faster than a yacht blaring 19th century martial music, followed by a rich-ass moron being a dumbshit over the same loudspeaker.
9OK, I’m glad this jerkwad pufferfish has a frickin stinkboat/powerboat, ’cause real yachts are sailboats like mine.
From the pic at links below it looks like, and is about the same size as, the ‘yacht’ owned by another Rethug, that one from Lubbock, Randy Neubarger (sp?).
In the Coast Guard on-scene picture (links below), Jerk Joe’s boat is right next to a buoy, that buoy may actually mark a ‘hazard to navigation’, like a rock. Which would mean that Joe T really is an asshole.
I’m downloading a chart of the Charlestown, RI area to confirm if that buoy does designate a rock, or if that rock is charted. From the pic, Jerk Joe’s boat is only about 100 yards off of a sandy, non-rocky beach, so I don’t know about this.
I’ll be back once I get the proper chart and look it over in my charting program. Since I’m not familiar with these waters at all, this could be a bit tricky, the CG FB page does have quite a bit of locational info though, nd the pic should help out a bunch.
Coincidentally, I have kinfolk who live in the towns mentioned on the USCG Faceborg page linked below.
USCG aerial picture of stranded Jerk’s boat:
https://images.dailykos.com/images/563893/large/JT.jpg?1531167390
USCG Faceborg page of the incident (can’t ‘copy’ hardly any text from it…maybe you have to be logged in? which I never do there)):
10https://www.facebook.com/USCoastGuardNortheast/photos/a.10150178279529398.310117.273794229397/10155971750604398/?type=3&theater
Are we not going to mention his sheer lack of connection with the people on the beach? Maybe we should be worried about him reading this and having a sudden insight … naw, his reading level is probably also modeled on Trump’s, which means one pagers, with crayolas to color in the pictures.
When my friends and I would hump a cooler and blankets to the beach, somebody coming by in a yacht would spell out in clear letters: I’m not one of you working slobs. Beyond the irritation of having some Rich Guy blaring out music and a speech, there’s just the image of the privileged nobility unwilling to actually get close enough to the proles to talk face to face. Instead he will scatter promised largesse (paid for by the taxpayers) in the form of … trash barrels.
As the politcal pros would say, the optics are not great on this one. If I was working on the campaign of one of his rivals, the TV spots and ads would write themselves. I suspect Maggie is right: he was liquor’ed up, and right now his campaign staff are horrified at his “bright idea”.
11On a stretch of the best charted coastline in the world on a fancy yacht that, I beleive by law, must have a GPS, Depth sounder and other navigational tools this twit went and found a “new” rock, or was it marked on the charts?
12Stupidity and incompetence do not do this justice for base ineptitude that is an understatement.
Another case of a twit with more money then sense.
Not only that but picture of how close in the boat was when it hit plus the speed it must have been going to cause a hole in the hull bespeaks of a recklessness that rivals his hero, demented donnie.
The best chart I found for that incident area is NOAA 13215, which you can download a PDF of here, then open it with a pdf reader (or just let your browser open it if you have the pdf extension):
Chart 13215
Title: Block Island Sound Point Judith to Montauk Point
Type: Harbor Chart
Scale: 1:40,000
Edition: 21
Print Date: 9/1/2014
http://www.charts.noaa.gov/PDFs/13215.pdf
You can find it at this link (with others), but you’ll have to pan and zoom the map to the location in RI;
http://www.charts.noaa.gov/InteractiveCatalog/nrnc.shtml
If you look on Chart 13215, aprx at: 41deg 21’min N by 71deg 38’minW , West of Point Judith, SE of Charlestown, you’ll see the “Charlestown Breachway” and “Charlestown Beach” designated, with the jetties shown in the pictures linked before. Zoom in tight to the jetties.
I see a rock shown near the jetty entrance (‘PA’- ‘Position Approximate’), and another on the other side of the jetties.
The shore area where JerkJoe’s boat is pictured shows 4 rocks just off the beach to the east of the east jetty (right about where Jerk’s boat is in the picture), but no buoy that I can see. That just means that the buoy is likely a locally provided one, which could simply designate a ‘beach standoff’ mark, or may indicate a rock.
There is another NOAA set of chart-related documents called “Coast Pilots”, which remarks in almost real-time (updated weekly) and great detail on such features, but I’m not going to dig the proper CP out and read through it for this.
The guy was just an asshole for taking a fairly large boat so close into a beach with (probably) well known hazards present.
13Correction:
14—– by 70deg 38’minW,
not: by 71deg 38’minW.
Sandridge, you remind me of a tee shirt I saw in a shop window years ago when we were at college in Annapolis. I understand that sailboats have the right of way over powerboats. The entire front of the shirt was covered with images of sailboats going in all directions, and up by one shoulder was a powerboat trying to get through them all with a word balloon saying “Oh $%#@!”
15It was a Bert and I homage:
16“Captain, what was that noise just now?”
“Hit a rock”
“Didn’t you know that rock was there?
“Course I did! Hit it, didn’t I?
Rhea, That’s a cute t-shirt theme, but it’s a dangerous myth that sailboats have an absolute ‘right-of-way’ (RoW) over powerboats.
A general rule of thumb is that sailors usually know the rules, boat handling and navigation pretty dang well.
While very few powerboaters know much of anything about rules, boathandling or navigation (out of the whole universe of powerboaters, there are many good power skippers of course, but just watch most of them out on the water, it’s scary. Especially inshore and on the lakes, like Lake Travis– OMFG!).
All vessels (well, most of them, in most waters, it’s complicated) are bound by the COLREGS, the “International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972 (COLREGs)”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Regulations_for_Preventing_Collisions_at_Sea
It’s a lot more complicated than this:
“18. Responsibilities between vessels
Except in narrow channels, traffic separation schemes, and when overtaking (i.e., rules 9, 10, and 13)
A power-driven vessel must give way to:
a vessel not under command;
a vessel restricted in her ability to manoeuvre (this may include vessels towing one another);[19]
a vessel engaged in fishing;
a sailing vessel.
[I never, ever, expect a powerboater to honor this rule, it just ain’t happening 98/100 times]
A sailing vessel must give way to:
a vessel not under command;
a vessel restricted in her ability to manoeuvre;
a vessel engaged in fishing.”
The primary goal of it all is to avoid a collision or allision. A small boat may technically have a ‘stand on’ privilege over a giant tanker or freighter, but would be a damned fool to try to exercise it.
Y’all may recall our US Navy having some recent problems following the rules, with several very serious collisions resulting. The Navy had some very serious ‘bridge management and command’ problems, hopefully fixed now.
I had a damned jetskier almost head-on crash into my big powerboat.
17I couldn’t practically do anything except hold my course and slow down (had a dam on one side, traffic on the other), while this fool came blasting straight at me at a bazillion mph, while –looking backwards the whole time– at his peeps back on the beach.
At the very last second he turned forward and saw my bow and pulpit was about to slice him into quarters, promptly crapped his shorts and made a fast 90degree turn out of the way, by ten feet or so. Didn’t bother me a bit, had at least 100fold weight and horsepower advantage, and a very solid hull.
Sandridge, my inner ear makes me seasick standing on the dock. I just assumed that sailboats have RoW over powerboats because it’s easier to turn a powerboat, assuming a person with a brain and eyes is in command. But I’m sure there are exceptions.
18Basically the rules of the road at sea is barring purposeful bad actions that the last vessel that could avoid the collision and did not is responsible
19As for myth of sail having absolute right of way there is a video of some nutcase in San Francisco Bay losing track of how to use a tiller and turning right in front of cruise ship
One can read the female crew/ wife/ passenger lips saying something along the lines of “you dumb s…” just as they disappeared in front of the bow
Wonder if this whack job had a similar immediate comment
To Sandbridge
20” maintain course and speed”
Whenever a bigger vessel is caught in a flock of smaller more maneveural vessels.
So, it’s unanimous; the dude is a bleedin’ cheese-monkey who should have his certs to operate removed, much like a tumor.
21To paraphrase: “It pays attention to the charts, else it gets the hose again.”
22Having been a courteous, not littering beach-goer, I appreciated the one can at the entrance, more of them means more people paid to empty them, and who pays them? And there are always those people who “miss”, just like they “miss” the toilet seat.
23