I’ve also sailed into the slip a few times, but on a smallish boat of only 26’. Most of the time we row in though.
In case it’s not bleeding obvious, these are the kinds of slips I’m talking about. Running left and right across the picture is the channel you’d come in through, then make a sharp turn to head accurately into the narrow space of the slip, then put the engine in reverse to come to a stop at exactly the right place.
I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible to dock here without an engine. I’m saying I’d never attempt it, and I’ve never seen anyone who has. It’s not clear from the picture, but the thing you run into if you don’t stop in time is solid concrete. The other thing you run into without precise rudder control is your neighbour’s boat!
The ship is currently docked back where it started, Pier 17. On the local news last night they said it will stay there until all inspections are done. It will then be towed a short distance away to a dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where it will be repaired. Most of the crew has returned to Mexico.
Your pic includes an empty slot along the seawall at the middle right. Given favorable conditions I’d totally sail up that channel from the left and make the right 90 into that empty slot. Sailing all the way into the congestion and very narrow channels at far right in the middle distance would be a bit much for my taste.
Yes, the whole dock is unyielding. But it’s got a bump strip, I’ve got fenders, and the nature of a boat bow is that if I get in there and collide with the end of the slip at 1 or 2 knots the bow just rides up a few inches, then slides right back down; readily using up the extra kinetic energy without damage.
Of course the right way includes having a crewperson up near the bow on the finger side = starboard, with a line attached to the bow cleat on that same side. Who jumps off the boat onto the dock as the bow passes the end of the finger entering the slip. And so has 20-30 feet of run to act as either your brakes or your booster engine to get you stopped in the right spot fore/aft. As well as preventing at least the bow from drifting away from the finger towards your slip-mate.
Not reckless, at least under benign enough conditions.
I presume you’re referring to a bump strip on the finger dock, not the concrete wall. And fenders only protect the sides of the boat.
No, if you don’t stop in time (let’s say because of the failure of a balky engine just when you need to throw it in reverse) and the boat smacks into the concrete wall, even at 1 or 2 knots, the bow does not ride up and then down without any damage. Ask me how I know! 
And something else I happen to know is that fiberglass repair in a marina ain’t cheap.
If your slip ends hard against a 2 or 5 foot tall seawall, then yeah, failure to stop on time gets expensive quickly. Ouch.
More typically there’s the setup in your picture: a 4-6 foot wide “sidewalk” of floating deck/dock parallel to the seawall set 6-18" above the water level from which the floating intra-slip fingers extend perpendicularly. Which walkway is wide enough you can safely ride your bow up onto it a little ways. I’d not want to hit it at 6 knots with the sails still pulling, but drifting at 1-2 knots with jib down and main flapping? Sure. BTDT. The Braille method of braking.
I’ve been around a lot of marinas in California and I can’t recall a single berth dead-ending into a wall. There would always be a dock walkway and then several feet of water between the hull at the water line and any vertical surface.
FTR, that picture is a screenshot from Google Maps of the actual marina where the incident occurred and where I kept that boat. You’re probably correct, though, because those events go back more than 40 years (scary thought!) and they’ve undoubtedly changed their docking configurations many times since then.
But I can assure you that at the time, when pulling in to a finger dock, the thing you were facing was a bare concrete wall whose height above the water varied with the annual changes in Great Lakes water levels, but was typically around 5 feet. You really, really needed to stop before making contact with that thing!
The collision took about a ping-pong ball size gouge out of the bow, so not really a huge deal, and it was patched up perfectly. The much bigger expense was getting an engine overhaul so shit like this never happened again!
I have seen brought up in places like What’s Going on in Shipping the scenario of a malfunction in a reversible pitch propeller or in the controls thereof.
I lived for a few months in a highrise on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland. When the boats would race the turnaround buoy was right in front of us and generally speaking the return was the downwind leg. Even watching from shore it was thrilling to watch through glasses the spinnaker come up and the boat visibly accelerate.
It was also instructive watching an experienced crew vs. an inexperienced or inept one. Boats would come to the buoy neck and neck then a few seconds difference in getting that big balloon of a sail up would mean a hundred yards a couple minutes later.
NZ navy senior management breathing a sigh of relief at this point – not the last Navy to publicly run into something.
The Mexican Navy Rams the Brooklyn Bridge
When asked to comment, the Bridge, “Huh, when?”.
When? Why on Sink-o de mayo, of course!
No one wants to wake up to a container ship in the garden.
My brother had a 26’ McGregor sailboat. Water ballast, and a drop center board. Well, Retractable center board.
It had a ~10 hp outboard on it, and rudders. The engine could not turn, you had to depend on the rudders. So at slow speed, you could not just jack the engine to starboard or port and drag the stern of the boat around. You had to have some speed for the rudders to work, maybe not a lot, but some.
And, it had a water ballast that could be emptied on your way into port. And a retractable keel board for shallow ports/docks. With the ballast gone, and the keel board up, a little bit of wind would turn you into and uncontrollable hocky puck even with the sails down.
Pretty typical that outboards on any sailboat above about 20 feet are fixed azimuth and you need to use the boat’s rudder to steer. The good news is sailboats have vastly larger rudders than to power boats of the same size. And the rudder often has a larger throw as well.
But yeah, if you have no speed through the water, you have no steering.
Fortunately for the Mexicans, their accident wasn’t even the biggest naval screwup of the week, by a significant margin:
There is the phenomenon of prop walk that you can leverage at or near zero speed. For reasons I can’t remember, engaging the prop from a stop tends to first cause a lateral motion at the stern of the boat. Forward engagement walks the stern one direction and reverse the other. A 40ish foot Catalina I used to rent could spin in its own length through careful jockeying of the throttle.
The satellite picture in the CNN main article seems hard to decipher, but it appears that all that blue is a series of huge blue tarps covering the capsized ship, presumably in a desperate effort to try to minimize the shame.
Given that North Korea is a country where citizens have been arrested for the crime of showing insufficient enthusiasm for Dear Leader, I can only imagine the fate that will befall those considered responsible for an accident so major it would be a blow even to a wealthy country.
Somebody want to tell him about his country’s prestige?