People send all kinds of things via email, but the photos I received from a reader on July 19 gave me pause. There, suspended in mid-air by a camera’s shutter, was a massive yacht plunging nose-first into the water, with her crew riding her down. These photos are of the “holy $#@!” variety, no matter who you are.

Following the accident, the boat was a total loss.

Watching a 62,000-pound, $2 million yacht do a face-plant will make anyone stand still and think for a moment. But for boaters who have seen their own vessels raised in a sling or blocked up on the hard, the images strike a particular chord. This is the nightmare scenario. Like a fin in the water next to you, it’s something you really never want to see.

Most of us get pretty close to our boats. We know what the engines and pumps sound like , what the cabin and the bilge smell like, what the helm feels like. To imagine your boat in ruin, whether dropped or sinking (or both), is horrible indeed.

So I was stunned that someone captured this particular massacre on camera. I thought the pictures might be fake, but there was also that nagging what if? If they were real, maybe we could get permission to use them. We could hang them on a story about boat insurance or something like that (“good art,” as all editors know, is hard to find).

I emailed the reader and asked him where they came from. He told me that, as happens so often, they had been passed friend-to-friend as a gag forward (this one said “How NOT to Launch a yacht,” and I have since seen others that riff on the “priceless” commercial). I emailed some of the guys involved in that email chain, and got no response. So I turned it over to Kari Pugh, one of our editors, for further investigation (you can read her account and ask her questions in Forums).

She ran it down and found that the photos were having a life of their own, bouncing around the Internet. They had been on Snopes.com, on Cargolaw.com and were viewed more than 70,000 times on YachtForums.com. As I said, they struck a chord with boaters.

Each website carried some news on the pictures, but nobody had really pieced it all together. When a Carver spokesman weighed in with new information and verified the photos for us, it became clear that the photos themselves were the story. And so that’s how we played it. The story was viewed more than 100,000 times Tuesday.

Funny enough, as I was writing this, I received an email from a broker selling the Carver Marquis, which is the type of boat that fell. I had gone to the manufacturer’s site to pull some specs on the boat, and I had to join the mailing list to download a brochure. I dutifully gave my name and checked “no” when asked if I was planning to buy.

Yet here was an email from John Martini, the general manager at Martini Yacht Sales in Maryland (I kid you not). I’m sure he’s just a nice guy who generates sales letters as part of his job, but his timing was off. “I was recently made aware of your interest in a 55 Marquis Yachts,” the note said. “We have one 55 Marquis left in stock that is ready for delivery, and now is the time to make your best deal.”

Thanks, John. But I’m not in the market just now.

Getting serious, the photos do beg questions about how slings – the type used at the boatyard, not the loading dock – should be operated, and how to properly get a boat into and out of one. We’ll probably write something along those lines this week (we have good art). Meanwhile, we are having fun watching people click away. I can hear the silent whispers of “holy $#@!.”

-Glen Justice, Editor

Falling four stories left the crew with only minor injuries. But the boat sank.

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