We had just put our boat in the water and I stood there with my dad’s good friend at the Folly Beach landing on a beautiful Saturday morning headed to Morris Island for a morning of surf fishing. Suddenly we heard a bunch of shouting coming from the top of the ramp. Looking up I saw a boat and trailer rolling down the ramp with a guy running and screaming behind it and eventually catching up and jumping into it. My dad’s friend grabbed me and the boat and moved us to the side just as the boat and trailer crashed into the water at the bottom of the ramp. Apparently the tongue on the trailer was badly rusted and when the trailer started down the ramp the tongue broke and luckily the result was a boat and trailer half submerged with nobody hurt.
For many people reading this, spring marks your first time to the boat ramp with a brand new boat you just picked up from the dealer. While we’ve written a few articles over the year on how to respect others and launch your boat in an efficient manner, we’ve never really talked about just how dangerous a boat ramp can be. That morning at the boat ramp could have ended in tragedy if my father had not had the foresight not to leave me standing there alone holding the boat. There would have been no way for me to move the boat out of the way in time to avoid the boat and trailer and if I had moved and left the boat the guy that jumped into the runaway boat would have probably been hurt when his boat collided with ours.
As the population in the Charleston area grows our boat ramps are becoming more crowded and assuming others at the ramp are experienced and know what they doing is a recipe for disaster. I have seen many things happen at ramps over the year sometimes to the person who did not know what they were doing and sometimes to others as a result of the person that did not know what they were doing. I’ve seen hundreds of arguments, a few actual fights and I’ve seen people coming in off of the water after have too much to drink, bang into docks and other people’s b