The Instant Mariners

No one in his right mind would climb into an airplane for the first time and try to solo. Hardly anyone over the age of 16 would expect to hop in a car and go off without knowing how to drive. But put a man in a power boat and he becomes the instant mariner. He requires neither operator's license nor the barest acquaintance with navigation or mechanics. All he has to do is punch the starter button and take off, trusting to God and the U.S. Coast Guard.

At last count, some 26 million Americans were going down to the sea--or lake or river--in 5,400,000 power boats. Many of them, of course, have become experts at the game, and even the neophytes usually get home in one piece. The water, contrary to legend, is more forgiving than, say, the thin air or a concrete abutment. Even so, the Coast Guard responded to 43,000 "Mayday"* distress calls last year, the vast majority of them from power-boatmen, who also accounted for 875 of the 1,312 deaths on the water.

Don't Bother. "At least 75% of the accidents could have been easily avoided by minuscule foresight," sighs Captain David Oliver of the Coast Guard in Chicago. "Mostly it's just plain stupidity." Seasoned boatmen still shake their heads over the youthful sport who recently went blasting around Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., with a water-skier in tow. Keeping his eyes on the skier, he slammed at 30 m.p.h. into a cabin cruiser, decapitating himself in the process. Equally foolish were the nine people who piled into a 16-ft. outboard and put to sea from York, Me., last June. Naturally, the boat soon foundered; eight of the nine boaters drowned. All nine might have been saved if they had only thought to carry life jackets. But a lot of people do not bother with them. And why? Consider the answer of one power-boater on Oregon's Willamette River when a Coast Guard safety check found no life preservers aboard his cabin cruiser. "They don't match the color of my boat, that's all," said the owner.

Checking the weather ought to be a basic precaution; yet the Coast Guard reports that an astonishing number of boaters pay it no heed. One day last fall, the forecast for Lake Michigan called for squalls and 40-m.p.h. winds. Nevertheless, hundreds of fishermen set out in search of coho salmon. When the storm hit, the Coast Guard did all the fishing, hauled 300 anglers and seven dead bodies from the water.

The simple matter of fuel presents another problem. A man will happily invest thousands of dollars in a boat, but turn into a pinchpenny when it comes to filling his gas tanks. In Southern California, an area that usually leads the nation in watery accidents, the island of Santa Catalina shimmers enticingly on the horizon, just 24 miles from Los Angeles. "Santa Catalina," says Coast Guard Lieut. Edward McGuire. "You can see it, and the distance seems perfect for a weekend's outing. Everybody makes a try for it, and lots fail: out of gas." In Miami, power-boatmen quickly learned that the local Coast Guard was giving away gas to those whose tanks went dry. "Until some of our skippers got tough and charged a fee," recalls a Coast Guardsman, "we were running a floating gas station."

Hippies at Sea. Navigation is a sore point. "You'd be amazed at how many people think they can find their way around coastal waters with nothing but a highway road map," says one Coast Guardsman. Take the case of the New York boater who radioed last month that he was drifting powerless "somewhere in Long Island Sound." After fruitlessly combing the Sound with search planes and patrol vessels, the Coast Guard finally located him, three days later, 100 miles out in the open Atlantic. That man was lucky he had a radio. So many do not--like the boatload of hippies who put to sea from Boston last year with only a homing pigeon for communication. When the weather turned bad, the hippies released the bird. Eventually they were rescued off the New Jersey coast.

One obvious answer to the problems on the waterways is a federal licensing program run by the Coast Guard. But neither Congress nor the Coast Guard is anxious to take such a drastic step; it would involve mountains of red tape and untold millions of dollars. The next best thing is to educate boaters about the machines they operate and the elements they defy. The U.S. Power Squadron and the Coast Guard Auxiliary provide free classes in seamanship and safety. But the classes appeal to the prudent, not to the boaters who need them most. "We are missing a large segment of people," concedes the Coast Guard's Captain David Oliver. "It seems to take an incident at sea before most people dream that anything might actually happen to them."

* This term derives from the French "M'ai-dez"--"Help me."

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