This accident was not a result of the landing surface being a boat....but of pilot ineptness
All accidents have a train of events, sometimes referred to as the swiss cheese model, when a top performing individual, as in this case, comes to grief it behooves the system to address the holes that allowed the accident to occur. Here we had a chap attempting something he had never done before, is it surprising that he might have fluffed it in the great scheme of things? What percentage of your military accidents are due to your "ineptness", or are they due to the human frailties that befall the rest of us. C-130 XV304 with a load of troops made an unintentional gear up landing at Brize Norton, There was no reaction or any corrective action from the crew when the alarm sounded in the cockpit on approach, informing the crew that the undercarriage was not lowered. No technical anomalies were found on the aircraft or its equipment and the aircraft was written oiff. None are immune.
https://www.baaa-acro.com/crash/cras...s-brize-norton
Chuck Yeager wrote off an F-104 that was down to your word "ineptness", the root cause though was his ego wouldn't allow the project pilot, who was skilled at the task Yeager was to attempt, to brief him on what the flight entailed, Yeagers instrument flying skills were not up to the mark and his subsequent loss of control was because he had no understanding, nor wanted to be briefed, of the effects of gyroscopic precession when the aircraft was out of the sensible atmosphere and reliant on the puffer jets for control. As Neil Armstrong commented, "He was a great stick and rudder man, but was bereft of engineering understanding".