Delta 88 shooting the gap between rocks..

Well, what do you make of the fact that the captain turned the AIS transponder off shortly after the video became viral?
BTW, the boat had moved out of Norwegian waters, in the meantime.

What you are now telling is a fact in itself.
Would you expect such behavior from a normal AIS signal?
You are right on one thing, though: what I said ref. the boat having moved out of Norwegian waters is actually uncertain.

If you say it's normal for the captain of this boat to fiddle with AIS signal, I take your word for it.
But I hope you're not implying your approval to such practice!
I can assure you that whenever you'll locate my boat anywhere on marinetraffic website, it's because that's where she actually is.

Fairenuff. I fully agree that, generally speaking, the web is nowadays the most efficient fact-distortion machine.
Still, the observation that the AIS signal of Big Beaver is messed up is something I would call a fact, rather than fake news...

I meant to ask before, but I forgot:
Are you possibly referring to eSysman, who pretends in a recent YT video to have identified this channel as the spot in the video?
I found that pathetic, because it shows that the guy does not have the faintest idea about how to convert a view of a place into a position on a map.

To the point that it made me curious to do what he pretended to have done, and it took me just a few minutes to find that this is clearly the spot, instead. With the boat heading WSW of course, as per pic below...

Liam, I don't think it would be a big deal to keep a boat like that on a straight course at anything above 5 or 6 knots, regardless of propulsion, even with some head wind.
Anyway, it's a bit pointless to overthink all the possible justifications for crossing the strait as they did, like better tracking, reduced draft with the boat planing, or whatever, because they could have easily avoided that channel altogether.

In fact, even if I have no idea of where they came from and where they were going, the simple truth is that they could have gone around the islet S of the narrow strait instead, staying always in open waters.
An islet so small that even its complete circumnavigation is less than 2NM...
Enough said, methinks!

Mmm...
Speed up through that strait rather than waste just two or three minutes and go round the islet in open waters, where they could go as fast as they liked?
I don't think so.