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The original was posted on /r/sailing by /u/ColonialDagger on 2025-07-30 21:45:24+00:00.

I went to the Foundation for about 15 years, eventually working there for nearly a full decade. I became fairly close to many of the people who also worked there, but I left a few years ago so the news of this only made its way to me today. Saw the threads and thought I would help clear some misinformation I saw present in other threads.

• The vessel was not a Hobie Wave, it was a Hobie Getaway.
• I’ve seen the video, pay attention to the palm tree in the video: there is little to no wind. If you’ve sailed a Hobie Wave, you know they suck in those conditions. If you’ve sailed a Hobie Getaway, you know that it moves like a brick in those conditions. There is nothing the sailboat could have done to get out of the way even if they tried.
• The area was in/adjacent to a channel, but there isn’t much of an option in that area. The traffic can be very heavy both in and out of the channels, this is right next to Downtown Miami. You can only avoid traffic so much.
• They had a safety boat. For about 5 years, I was the person driving the safety boat. We always did our best to keep things under control as much as possible, but you can only do so much. From jet skis being driven by dumbass tourists who don’t know how they work to large tour vessels who are there every day multiple times a day, our experience with them was almost solely dictated on who was the person driving that vessel. I recall one incident (a long time ago now) where I had to floor it, almost sending one of the other instructors off the back of the safety boat, grab a kayak from the back, and slam my safety boat into reverse to keep them from getting run over by a tour vessel who didn’t even try to slow down. These vessels not even trying to slow down/change course is, unfortunately, a very common occurrence.
• These kids are there every day during the summer and every weekend during the year. They are extremely well known in the area. This is not a one-off situation where they went into new waters.
• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE be respectful with what you say online. I use reddit frequently and this flew under my radar (granted, I wasn’t subbed to here). I found out there were reddit threads from people who have never used reddit in their lives. A huge amount of people are still in shock and grieving.

My biggest point about this is that people involved are finding these threads and reading them, so we need to be careful about what we say online. We can have our own assumptions, I know I do, but we need to be careful about voicing this stuff online. We often forget there’s another human behind the screen reading what we type, and on social media there’s often many other people reading it. As we all know, the sailing community is a very tight-knit community, especially sailing in local areas. Even if we all try to make our own guesses as to what happened, let’s try not to speculate and point blame as best we can. 2 kids died, 2 are still critical, and hundreds of people are in shock over all of this.