Turning basin
A turning basin or swinging basin is a wider body of water, either located at the end of a ship canal or in a port to allow cargo ships to turn and reverse their direction of travel, or to enable long narrow barges in a canal to turn a sharp corner.
For a complete 180 degree turnaround, the width of the basin must be more than the length of the longest vessel normally traversing the waterway. Onboard bow thrusters or tugboats may assist in manoeuvering the ship.
Examples

The Pegasus barge docked in the turning basin beside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center

The Nottingham Canal turns at right-angles at this point, so this basin was built to allow narrowboats to negotiate the turn

The Seybold Canal's turning basin for smaller pleasure craft in Miami, Florida
gollark: I have to say that it's a bit of a weird choice by whoever chose it to use a proprietary charts thing (CanvasJS, it was mentioned on the site itself) instead of one of the many, many FOSS implementations.
gollark: Doesn't have to and didn't, even.
gollark: Good to know. I'll just fix the delay at 10 minutes or something for now though.
gollark: It's possible that my bot is limited to one post per 10 minutes in which case I'll have to... wait a bit?
gollark: Anyway, when I get home I'll see if I can program a bot to do this once every minute or something.
See also
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