Strategies for not having my boat tridented into the soup

Question

Sometime in the past, Mojang added boats with chests... this makes it even more important.

But basically, the drowned shut down all boat travel everywhere. In large oceans I can usually survive by noticing underwater ruins and simply avoiding them before I come within spawning range... but rivers seem to be impassable.

It seems like the boat is instantly destroyed 50% of the time, but the rest it will take a second shot. These come in much too quickly for the warning to have been any help... 1.5-2 seconds afterward. I do not stop or slow down, hoping to outrun the second shot, but likely I am directly overhead with the first shot and the second therefor is still going to be at close range.

If I managed to get armored up by that point in the game, I can survive maybe as many as 4 or 5 hits. But this always seems to be not nearly enough. Swimming to shore can take far longer than the 7.5 seconds I have before I am dead, and doesn't even put me out of the danger zone if there is no cover on the river bank or shore.

I play in large biomes, so I think the rivers are much wider (they seem to be... this is good for the most part, they were often unnavigable in non-large-biomes). I play hardcore, so this is discouraging, I'll often wait several weeks before starting another game.

Personally, I think Mojang really screwed up with the drowned and their tridents, they're unbalanced to a degree that is absurd. I don't mind dying (that's what makes the game fun), but there don't seem to be any strategies that mitigate this failure mode other than:

• Stay on land, always
• Absurd levels of powering up (Protection 4 netherite with hot-barred potions) that are impractical or impossible without boating

Is there a better way to play, some technique or strategy, that will allow me to continue without this frustration? All 3 of my games started in the last two months have ended in this fashion, and there seems little that can be done about it.

Answer 1

Don't touch the water and don't travel at night nor in thunderstorms, according to this wiki:

Drowned are passive‌[JE only] or neutral‌[BE only] during the day if no player in range is touching the water. Drowned ignore players on land, players in boats, and players that have attacked them or other drowned.
[...]
During the night or in thunderstorms, they become hostile and attack any player or baby turtle they see, without provocation.

Answer 2

The only way to avoid the tridents is to swerve out of the way the second you see them throw it. You should also use wide-swerving methods which decreases the chance of them hitting the boat. If you're boat is being sunk so much, you need to swim away before placing the boat back down. They can't hit your boat so much if you have enough distance to evade the tridents. I also recommend keeping your distance as wide from them as possible. The bigger the distance, the better chance you can avoid being sunk to Davy Jones locker!

Answer 3

If you don't use a boat with chest you could always hotkey a new boat and directly place it if the boat you are sitting in is destroyed. Enter the new boat as fast as possible and by sitting in a boat you should be able to escape fast enough.