Against my better judgment, here goes...
No speed limit, no matter how high or low it's set, is going to be a magic prevent-all for accidents. Short of banning human presence on the water's surface, there is nothing that will prevent an operator from accidentally missing a marker, hitting a shoal, or running into an island. It might help minimize the damage if one does those things at a lower speed, but we can't legislate away the fact that accidents can and will happen.
That being said, all we know right now is enough to fuel conjecture and speculation. We can only guess at speed. We don't know for certain who was at the helm (although we think we have an idea based on press reports). We've heard conflicting reports about the weather -- was it foggy, rainy, had it cleared, was there some moonlight? Those reports came from different observations around the lake at differing times on the night in question. I've looked across that part of the lake from the shore on a mostly
clear night and viewed only inky darkness over the water where I knew a Diamond and a Rattlesnake Island
should be, but darned if I could see them. Multiply that 10-fold trying to figure it out while under way. We just don't know.
Now, also against my better judgment, I'm going to hazard a semi-educated guess at speed and do so based solely on the weight, position and damage of the boat shown in the photo above and some common references. I'll admit my marine structural engineering experience comes from designing nuclear-powered underwater weapons platforms with advanced materials and not the composite-layup pleasure boats being discussed here, but the fundamental engineering principles don't change. (Great.... more speculation....
)
Last year a boat ran aground on Eagle Island and ended up ON EAGLE ISLAND, well into the trees. That wasn't the case in this accident. And in looking at the photos, the damage is limited to the first 20% or so of the length. What looks catastrophic at first seems to be fairly well contained. It appears the top portion of the bow remains intact although disconnected, possibly sheared horizontally where it came in contact to what appears to be a roughly 90-degree edge of the rock in the Channel 9 video. That seems reasonable on the surface. In addition, the rest of the hull appears to have split and peeled back along the keel line. Those are what the two flaps of hull hanging down look like to me. This also seems like a reasonable mode of crack propagation and failure for perpendicular contact of the rigid axis of the hull to a stationary surface. In the photo, the lift harness is compressing the deck and hull and some delamination of the deck/hull interface seems to be present. I don't know if this is a result of loading/unloading of the boat by crane after the designed structural integrity of the vessel had been compromised, or if that was a result of the collision itself, but for the sake of speculation, I'll guess the latter.
What I'd really like to know is how heavy the anchor is and how far away the summer camp is that allegedly got nicked by the anchor. Putting those two pieces together would give us an approximate idea of the momentum present and required to get the anchor from the boat to the building, thus yielding an approximate speed of the boat at the point of anchor departure. But even then, that calculation quickly gets complicated by whether or not the anchor was mounted, how much drag there was on the winding mechanism, blah, blah, blah, but it would be nice to know.
Anyway, that the boat reportedly came to rest in the water and not ON the island, that the hull structural failure is limited to the front of the boat and that it appears to be relatively well contained separation and delamination, and that we can't currently account for the cause of the hull/deck separation (although I'd be comfortable assuming initially that this is where much of the collision energy may have been dissipated, also accounting for the reported loud noise), I'm guessing (emphasis on guessing) that people will be surprised at the speed with which this collision took place. I'm way way way out here on this limb speculating based on many assumptions and one photo, but I don't think the speed at impact is going to be nearly as high as people think it was. But time will bear that out.
We now return to our regularly-scheduled agenda-driven finger pointing...