Well, I think they at least made a token effort at explaining the stopping by having a line on how they need to go easy on the engines to extend the range of the ship—so maybe the stopping was just that.
I don’t think that’s a particularly convincing reason, but still, if I’m not just overinterpreting this then at least there was somebody aware of the problem, enough at least for me to suspend my disbelief in that regard.
I don’t know about marine radios, but if someone got their hands on a radio direction finder they could get a bearing. If they had a directional antenna they could get an idea of where they are as well. The guy also found out where Abigail was relative to a smoke plume off of Santa Monica, which helps.
FWIW, many airplanes have an Automatic Direction Finder (ADF). My dad’s Skyhawk had one like this one (top unit), and on long flights we’d sometimes listen to AM radio on it. The dial would show the direction of the transmitter. Note that I am not suggesting that the pirates have an airplane, and that I don’t know about marine units or frequencies. I’m just saying that there are means available to find the direction of a transmitter that are fairly common.
If the guy you are looking for is sitting still, and you can find the direction where is signal is strongest from two different locations, you draw two lines from your locations, or you and a buddy some distance away, and the other guy is where the lines intersect. It is appropriately called triangulation.
Yes. I didn’t mention triangulation because I was working on the premise of a single receiver. Of course the (presumed) pirates are on a movable station. OTOH, the pirates would probably assume that Abigail is not sitting in one spot waiting to be found.
I thought they stopped the boat specifically so they could fish, and they just happened to pull up in the vicinity of some aqua-zombies. That part didn’t seem strange to me.
I don’t spend much time in boats, but it does seem like they’d have spotted the overturned hull a long way off. It’s way too big to be a plausible dramatic reveal after they’ve gotten close enough to encounter zombies.
As for the kid on the radio, maybe someone could explain the norms to me. I am by no means paranoid, I would say, but I don’t give out information to strangers. I don’t even like when people on the bus ask me where my stop is. Not that any given person is likely to be planning a robbery, or if that the bus or library or whatever is a good place to scout marks. But I don’t talk to people I don’t know about where I live, what I’ve got and what my schedule is like. This level of risk aversion is not entirely rational, but is it unusual.
Because I am just flabbergasted at how much this girl, even at her most cautious, was willing to say. In an actual life-or-death situation, I would be scared to transmit at all. I have no idea how normal it would be for a boat to have the ability to find the direction of a signal in pre-apocalyptic conditions, but it isn’t exactly rocket science. And if somebody started asking me if I could see a reference point like a plume of smoke, I’d have spidey-sense squiggles shooting out of my head. Is it not normal for people to be at least this paranoid?
Someone up thread pointed out that Our Heroes aren’t operating in Zombie Apocalypse Mode yet. They (some, anyway) are working in Distressed Mariners Need Help mode.
Especially since they’d been motoring all night and were still just a couple of miles from the shore.
We’ve seen nothing to indicate whether Abigail is a displacement or planing hull – except for the claimed balls to the wall maximum speed of 20 knots. To me that suggests a displacement hull with a likely cruising speed of perhaps 12 to 15 knots. I see reinforcement in Strand’s claim of a range of a couple thousand miles. All that says “ocean going trawler (displacement) hull” to me. Marine engines are built to run at moderate speed (“cruising speed”) for extended periods of time, as necessary for ocean crossings. There’s no need to rest them or shut them down every little while. The ocean can be a nasty place, and in heavy seas turning the bow into the waves may be necessary to keep from broaching (taking crashing waves over the side resulting in sinking). You can’t just shut down your engines for a rest. Yes, running balls to the wall can damage engines, which is the reason no one would do that except in an emergency. But cruising can last for days.
So I’ll estimate “motoring all night” means at least 8 hours, so at least a hundred miles. How they’re still within sight of shore, when terrible things have befallen the shore, is beyond me. Also beyond me is this fits and starts travel method, when getting as far from the horrible goings-on as fast as possible is the only rational act.
Finally, Abigail has radar, and radars on boats like that have approach alarms. No way she could have come within ten miles of that hull, or even all the smaller floating junk, without screaming her electronic lungs out.
My memory of the previous season is spotty, so I can’t say what this girl in particular has actually seen or had related to her. But the totality of the story so far contains plenty of reason for generalized suspicion of your fellow human being.
As much as the episode seemed problematic about how they were dealing with the boat voyage, I didn’t recognize a lot of other details that have been brought up so far. I have a notion that just reading this thread I have done more research on how boats work than the writers did.
I do, and, I believe most of the people posting in this thread as well, agree with that.
Sorry if I’ve hijacked the thread into a treatise on marine subjects! But it annoys me that the writers make such enormous, thus such distracting, mistakes. And I know enough about the topic that the errors are impossible to overlook. Yes, I know it’s fiction. And I know it’s about zombies. That in itself should be enough of an error, or inconsistency from the real world, to overshadow all others. But it’s not.
To hold my attention I like my fiction to be concerned with people. We start with a world that is entirely (regular fiction) or almost entirely (science fiction) true to life. Then we make a change or two that affects the characters. It might be just a situation (e.g., trapped in an elevator) or it might be a physical parameter (zombification). The writer then explores how different characters having different backgrounds and different experiences and different temperaments deal with the scenario. But interest in the characters is overwhelmed when the supposedly real world displays continual differences from common experience-based reality. Stupid differences, easily avoidable by a little research and some amount of caring on the part of the writers. I mean really, these issues don’t advance the plot, they divert attention from it. And divert any interest we might have been taking in the story and the characters.
If the writers needed to inject some emergency terror arising out of the sea and surprising the characters, there are endless ways the plot could have achieved that goal without so badly fucking up on simple realities of the world, like how an actual boat operates. That’s just unnecessary. The writers are rather bad, or lazy. IMHO, of course. 
Although The Walking Dead show has done as much as anything else to mainstream zombie fiction, obsessive nerds are still a significant part of your audience.
One thing that worried me with the water zombies was that water would effectively negate the main advantage the living have over zombies. People are a lot clumsier under water. The water also nerfs any attempt to get a good skull cracking going, because the water has so much drag. Maybe we were supposed to understand that the zombies were all the more handicapped, but they do have the advantage that they are not dependent on being able to move quickly, and they don’t worry about breathing. If they can get a hold on you, they just have to pull themselves in for the bite and your ability to shake them off or knock them back is severely compromised.
If they continue with this kind of thing, I’m sure somebody will remember the value of spears and pneumatic crossbows. If the trope of people managing to load themselves up with weapons and ammo in a zombie apocalypse is just too much a commonplace to deserve mention, people getting a hold of a lot of flechettes and needle rounds might call attention to the issue again.
I have often wondered about the writing of TWD and now FTWD, that they have the characters do such ridiculously stupid things (or to setup ridiculously stupid scenarios) that it causes even me, who is neither a writer nor an obsessive nerd, to roll my eyes.
I mean, these writers must be competent right? Perhaps even very good to excellent. So what is it that prevents them from doing a better job at this?
Is it time pressure to get a script out without thinking it through? Is it showrunner pressure to “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead” and get right into the tension regardless of how logical or illogical the setup is? Or is it simply that no one cares about these details because the ratings are huge?
I know there are published fiction authors here at the SDMB. I wonder if they watch these (and other) shows with the same level of frustration.
One thing that bothered me about TWD is that Our Gang seems to think water is protection against zombie the same as it is vampires. Of course The Governor showed that zombies can exist in water, and then there were the poo zombies at the food bank.
Romero showed us that zombies can travel underwater in Land Of The Dead (2005), and in 1979 Lucio Fulci showed us zombies can be dangerous underwater.
It bothers me that nobody was following up with the girl on whether she was getting useful information. I mean, we’ve just seen LA get bombed by the US government. Can we try to contact the authorities or someone who knows what the hell is going on so that we can plan our next course? No, let’s just let the teenage girl chit chat for the entire episode with some guy she just met. I guess since Facebook and texting no longer work, let her lounge around all day blocking the only communications device we have.
I wanted to scream at the TV “Get off the fucking radio!”
The hundred miles assumes they headed straight out to sea. Didn’t Strand say something about going toward San Diego? They could be following the coast line and intentionally staying within sight of land.
If they’re still thinking there might be some place safe to go, that would be the plan. After all, even these idiots know they can’t just head out to sea and stay there forever.
Actually, I just realized the hundred miles can be valid whether they’re heading out to sea or following the coast line, but they’re probably doing the latter.
As is often the case with any thread about zombies, we have recourse to talk about Max Brooks’ World War Z, whose author has done the most comprehensive thinking about the subject of anybody. Sometimes I think other people making Zombie stories feel obliged to prove they didn’t read World War Z.
There were probably more details than I remember, but Brooks deals with zombies in water. There are loads of zombies on boats adrift, because getting on a boat was the first plan of a lot of people, and it often didn’t go so well. Many ended up in the water, where they were hunted even after the war ended by specialized divers. They continue to wash up on shores. People don’t try to swim in oceans anymore. Brooks did indulge himself in an extra implausibility, which he has a character basically own up to for him, that zombies manage to remain intact even in deep sea conditions. What he gets for that premise is some really tense drama with nuclear submarines having their thermal exhausts clogged with bodies trying to climb into the ship.
As I recall, the “plan” (ironic quotes deliberate) was to head down toward San Diego to see if the military was maintaining a strong point there. That’s roughly a hundred miles, give or take, from the Greater LA area depending on precisely where Abigail was anchored. So even at slow cruise, it would be less than an overnight trip. The prudent course might have been to stay put and wait for morning, perhaps while trying to make contact with any authorities via radio. Set a watch, make sure the radar is vigilant, and everybody else gets some rest. In the morning, at cruise speed they could leave after breakfast and arrive mid-afternoon, making the entire trip in daylight to be on the lookout for any- and everything. If, indeed, that still seemed like the best idea. Given their experience with their own home town military, I myself might not be too eager to take my nice boat, let alone myself, back into the reach of a lot of guys with guns and a possibly rather loose chain of command, if you get my drift.
I think Strand stated a 3,000 mile range for Abigail. Everybody on board has first hand knowledge of people becoming savage brutes, even if the cause is not understood and the involvement of reanimated dead wasn’t yet absolutely determined. Plus the implication that this was due to some sort of infection. Given all the above, I’d be racking everybody’s collective brains and digging through whatever materials might be on Abigail (yachtsman’s charts, harbor descriptions, marine chandlers, etc.) looking for the most isolated speck of land (isolation meaning less chance of infection – we know zombification is universal but they don’t) and with the smallest human population within 2,000 or so miles. Then head there, before the next Pacific storm blows in and demonstrates just how pathetically small Abigail really is.
