Hazards to Running Fast Boats

A recent article caught my eye about CTE brain damage to Navy crewmen who run fast boats in the ocean. For example, when they’re told to deliver Navy Seals to a certain place 50 miles away in six foot seas in one hour, they follow orders. Unfortunately, many of the boat drivers are getting brain damage from repeated wave shocks. There have been debilitating symptoms and even suicides.

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a brain disorder likely caused by repeated head injuries. It causes the death of nerve cells in the brain, known as degeneration. CTE gets worse over time. The only way to definitively diagnosis CTE is after death during an autopsy of the brain.

It’s a rare disorder that is not yet well understood. CTE doesn't appear to be related to a single head injury, but is related to repeated head trauma, often occurring in contact sports or military combat. The development of CTE has been associated with second impact syndrome, in which a second head injury happens before previous head injury symptoms have fully resolved.”

This leads me to wonder about the Southern Kingfish Association (SKA), whose anglers can now exceed 70 knots in heavy wave conditions. Most of their crews ride near the stern and sprawl on beanbags, to lessen the wave shock. Others near or including the driver, sometimes wear neck braces or even helmets. The best fishing spots are well known, sometimes 100 miles away, and often the first boat there catches the winning kingfish. When the chips are down and the money good, they really run those boats and then have to return for the 5:00 p.m. weigh-in. It’s certainly not for everyone and the few speed runs I have made with them are counted as my worst boat rides.

After our pleasant and adventurous summers in the 1980s during kingfish tournaments, when boats were much slower and you could spend three days and two nights offshore, there was no need to hurry. In my first tournament, I actually had to work at the office until noon. We didn’t arrive at our destination oil rig off Louisiana until after dark. In a 21-foot boat with one engine, you’d better believe we took our time.

Three days out there was so long, we could take naps, go swimming or scuba diving, and snapper fish at night when the triggerfish were asleep. (They were a real problem, back then). When another boat saw us diving and surface with a big snapper, the Galveston kingfish tournament promptly outlawed all snorkel gear, not even a mask on the boats to untangle floating rope tangled in a propeller. You get my point; they were great trips.

Not so for today’s go-fast kingfish boats that cost a fortune, some of them with four engines. Tournament directors are loath to cancel an event, especially the big ones on the Atlantic coast with up to 1,000 boats, and so off they go. Kingfish are actually caught around Atlantic jetties and off the beaches, so not everyone “puts the hammer down” like the U.S. Navy. But many fishermen still do, getting slammed over and over. Some of these guys a few years ago were getting sponsors and fishing a dozen or more weekend tournaments annually. And they really took a beating. A recent tourney this past summer in Florida had 700 boats, and first prize was an offshore boat worth $360K. You can bet there were plenty of heavy-handed boat drivers, that day.

I fished on three different SKA boats at speeds up to 70 miles an hour, and that’s about as much fun as staring into a hurricane, even in calm seas. The worst trip, aboard a 31-foot Fountain from Georgia, the owner would light a cigarette, floor the engines and never looked back. Seas were five feet high. I hung on for dear life behind the rod rack, standing up. We hit a wave so hard, the chum bag on deck, tied to the center console, hit the T-top ceiling and exploded ground up fish pieces all over us. Then I was knocked to the deck with a slightly sprained neck, bouncing from one hard object to another. It was either regain your feet, or keep pinballing on deck. It was absurd. The driver never looked back and if you went overboard, too bad.

Another time off Key West in January, always the SKA’s first annual event, we had great weather and did some pre-fishing. However, a norther was due on tournament day. I wisely bowed out, and the next day brought NW gusts up to 40 knots. Not sure how many boats made it back, but I heard my friend’s boat returned in 12-foot seas with a treble hook buried in someone’s forearm. It was too rough to remove the hooks.

This sort of activity compares so poorly with our halcyon days of the 1980s.

On shore, hanging out with these SKA crews, I’ve also seen odd behavior, just like with the Navy fast boat guys. I saw two fishermen, at least 45 years old, duke it out behind the motel in front of the kingfish crowd. Smack! Smack! The shorter guy wound up fishing with a black eye. This isn’t hard evidence the guys had CTI, however. Tournaments have always attracted the A-type personalities.

The hard-running Georgia captain was polite on shore, but on game day he was…quite different. He berated his 12-year old son for dropping a bundle of frozen ribbonfish, as we walked to the boat at 5:00 a.m. Once on the water, he yelled at his wife all morning like she was a Labrador retriever who wouldn’t fetch ducks. By lunch time, as we flew over whitecaps along that coast (the beach there at St. Petersburg in Florida was lined with motels and beachside bars), I briefly considered bailing out, swimming ashore, order a serious beverage or two, and grabbing a taxi back to my car. The day was that bad.

Kingfish tournaments don’t happen every day, though. What about fishing guides on the windy Texas coast? Some of those guys fish more than 200 days a year, on a coast where the SW wind can blow for two months for no reason. The bay guides fight wave chops while standing, and suffer other ailments over time besides brain trauma. Offshore boat captains have it worse with bigger waves, day after day. They don’t need to beat their clients, and don’t if it can be helped. Back in the day the offshore charterboats ran slower, the Bertrams at 20 knots or so, saving on fuel consumption.

Today’s go-fast offshore charterboats, run by young captains, often charge clients for fuel and they’re eager to get out there, banging through waves while their clients sit way back on beanbag chairs. That head-snapping pace could be taking a toll on these captains. And there is no proof of brain damage while they’re still living.

Texas marlin tournaments back in the day often called for returning to dock each evening, after dashing out a minimum of 50 miles offshore. If there were 10-foot seas, too bad. Some of the yachts limped back with broken fly bridges. What those rough seas did to the crews, injury wise, is unknown. They had to be the toughest billfish tournaments in this country, and many others. Some boat owners quit that scene and moved their boats to the quiet Pacific, where the swells might be 50 yards apart, in countries like Costa Rica.

There’s no head banging, down there.