I typed this out to post on another forum, after all that writeing I figure I'll post if here too while JB's away, I don't want him to think we are breaking the law with his old belovid "Sunshine lll"
<br /><br />I always noticed that being in a Whaler the coast guard seems to leave you bee more so then if you where in most other boats. I hardly ever get safety checked on the Sport-11 and now with the Montauk I notice it even more so, untill last night when the boat didn't make any difference.<br /><br />As most of you may or may not know, a few times a week a LNG "Liquid natural gas" tanker comes into Boston harbor, remember they stopped it for a while after 9/11? odiously, if one of those things blew up 1/2 the city would get taken out, its very heavily guarded. They dock it on the Chelsea river, you can see it from the tobin bridge. Most trailer boaters, like us launch at presidents landing in Medford, go threw the locks, and pass the tanker to get to the harbor.<br /><br />Last night three of us where out in the Montauk. On the way out, there was a big ship docked along the sea wall, but it wasn't a LNG. On the way back we where doing a bit of night fishing(caught a few nice blues, too). It was getting late, and we where trolling toward the locks to get to the ramp. I was driving, the RPS seat back was flipped forward and my dad and a friend had a few lines in the water. I was pretty dark, but I knew where I was going, so I didn't see a need to pull the spot light out of the console. As we passed under the tobin bridge, I could see a ship, but I wasn't sure if it was the same one as before or a LNG that came in while we where out. Then I saw blue flashing lights way up ahead of me. At that point I should have put the two together, but didn't. I thought maybe the lights where from a cop car on shore. After looking at the lights, for about a half hour putting along at like 2 mph, I realized that it was a police boat, actually, three of them rafting together. I turned around and pointed it out to my dad and his friend, we then noticed that it was a LNG tanker.<br /><br />We kept trolling for a while longer, making sure to stay outside the bouies then one of the three coast guard boats started heading toward the tanker, the other two, an older 25'whaler rafting against a much bigger inboard started heading straight toward us. <br /><br />When they reached us they asked us what we where doing, they kind of approached me,being I was standing at the console and my dad and friend where sitting down. We told them we where fishing. He then told us that's its against the law to stop or fish while the tanker is docked. We all quickly started apologizing and telling him we didn't know, he told us to get the lines out of the water and get a move on it, he escorted us the whole way up the river to the locks, he must have called ahead because the locks where already open when we got there.<br /><br />I never had anything like that happen while I was on the water before, I almost sh!t when he said it was "arrestable". Naturally, to my dad and friend, it wasn't as big of a deal.