Perils of the Surface

In the days when every boatman knew the difference between a jib and a jibe, a man who ventured upon the water in any vessel, large or small, did so with a lively respect for the perils of the deep and an awareness that the mariner's world required special skills and knowledge. Today the ubiquitous cabin cruiser seems to many a Sunday skipper like nothing more than a watertight version of the car he left parked at the marina, while the outboard motor has evolved from a poky put-put to a roaring, soaring substitute for a jet fighter plane. The result is a whole new set of perils of the surface.

The problem has become so serious that the U.S. now has a Safe Boating Week, and the Coast Guard observes it by issuing frightening statistics.

In 1904, there were 15,000 pleasure boats in the U.S. In 1947, there were 2,440,000. Last year, there were 7,468,000, and $2,506,000,000 was spent on them. Their skippers commit all manner of insanities--overloading outboards to the swamping point, buzzing each other for fun, cutting across bows, swooshing through swimmers with never a thought for their whirling propeller blades, examining the scenery instead of the sea before them as though there were no tomorrow. Frequently there is none. In 1962, there were 3,897 pleasure vessels involved in 3,085 accidents reported to the Coast Guard, resulting in 1,055 deaths from drowning and other kinds of accidents, plus 977 nonfatal injuries. Capsizing accounted for 42% of the total fatalities; 22% of them fell overboard, 12% drowned from a sinking.

Failure to wear a life jacket is the main reason for a watery death. Of the 529 fatalities investigated by the U.S. Coast Guard last year, 441 drowned because they were wearing no lifesaving devices. Of the 166 in peril who did have lifesaving devices, 98 were rescued.

Some states have licensing requirements for boats, but none have licenses for their pilots, who are all too likely to turn the ignition key in their new power cruiser and gun away from the dock without even having a chart of the waters or the know-how to read it if they did. The Coast Guard crew at Stepping Stones Light Station off New York City, where Long Island Sound meets the East River, spends a large part of the summer frantically waving a towel to warn sloppy skippers off the nearby reef. The shoal is covered with only a few inches of water, but extends for more than half a mile of deceptively open water. And a great many latter-day skippers operate on the theory that what you can't see can't hurt you. "They'll pay $40,000 for a cruiser, but they won't bother to get a proper chart for 750," says a coastguardman. "So they come by here running wide open, music blaring--and cream up on one of the rocks. Last season, the score was between 75 and 100."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.