On The Water As Elsewhere, Speed Kills
With America now into the serious vocation of vacation, the proper way to frolic on the water comes into play. And with it, a predicament - boats go too fast.
That goes for powerboats, mostly - from the little jet boats, or personal watercraft as some call them, to sport fishermen and on up to 100- foot luxury yachts.
How fast is fast? One hundred miles per hour is not uncommon.
And speed sells. Fountain Powerboat Industries of Washington, N.C., renowned for speedy craft, had sales last year of $41.6 million (representing 426 boats), up from $38.7 million the year before. “I don’t build anything that doesn’t run 60 mph,” founder and chairman Reggie Fountain recently told Soundings, the nautical publication.
Sixty mph translates to 88 feet per second. So what’s so foul about going so fast? A lot.
The Coast Guard, which has the impossible task of sustaining safety and sanity on the navigable waters of our nation, counted 743 accidents last year in which excessive speed played a role. All told, there were 716 deaths from recreational boating, according to the National Association of State Boating Law Administrators.
Messing about in boats is supposed to be fun, not fatal. Boating accidents collectively gain little attention unless special circumstances are involved, like what happened on a small lake near Winter Haven, Fla., in the winter of 1993.
In Florida for spring training, two pitchers for the Cleveland Indians were killed when their small boat ran into a dock at night while doing about 40 mph. Their names were Tim Crews and Steve Olin, and the accident happened in front of their families. It did not slow anyone down.
The essential conflict is between the proclaimed thrill of speed on the water and damage to self and to others. In its June issue, Soundings devoted six pages to speed and collected a batch of opinions.
Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist who studies risk takers, said, “The bottom-line motivation is simple. It’s the thrill.”
A reputable boat builder, Wellcraft, has an instruction program run by people like veteran speedboat racer John Connor. “We teach how to run fast safely, how to take care of passengers and crew,” Connor said.
And then he added, “We were out on the Mississippi the other day running 150 mph. It was a real kick. I hadn’t had my hands on a real fast boat in awhile.”
Not everyone gets the kick. While running an outboard one winter day about 50 mph around Key Largo, Fla., this nautical writer had to wear ski goggles because the wind pained my unprotected eyeballs.
Doing 70 mph aboard a hydrofoil on the Nile River once upon a time, this passenger did not dare put his head outside the cabin for fear it might detach itself.
Then there is the discomfort. At high speeds, water takes on the resistance of concrete, and a series of bounces off small waves brings to mind what it might be like tumbling inside a clothes dryer. Waves are often created by the wakes of other boats.
John Golia, a performance-boat enthusiast, told Soundings, “Wakes can be killers. If you hit one at 130, you could destroy yourself.”
How? The boat is going to take off, soar - and perhaps torque, thus spitting out its passengers.
A common boating advertisement shows models in bikinis sitting in plush seats holding tight, their craft creating a flashy wake at high speed. They are neither waving nor smiling, and they will remain seated until the skipper slows down. They can do nothing but hold on and be bounced. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
The discomfort factor extends itself to sailboats. In the reach for ever-faster speeds afloat, designers have created lightweight, flat-sided hulls with enormous rigs and sail areas. Vessels like these can pummel and exhaust their crews on distant voyages.
“Physical comfort is the key to safety. You start getting beat up and you make bad decisions, and bad decisions make bad conditions worse.” So wrote Ted Fontaine in a new book called “Sailors’ Secrets - Advice From the Masters” (McGraw-Hill).
In the same book, Barry Peale attributed some of the 15 deaths in England’s Fastnet ocean race of 1984 to such bad decisions.
He wrote, “Forced to lie a-hull, many crews made the dangerous choice of taking to life rafts because they were being shaken to pieces in their viciously rolling race boats.”
The water is said to be the last frontier for risk-takers. For this and other reasons, boating licenses, offshore speed limits and enforcement practices have been neither popular nor practical.
Chip Hanauer, a hydroplane race driver who has gone as fast as 210 mph, told Soundings, “I don’t think you can legislate discipline and responsibility by legislating the machines.”
For his relaxation, Hanauer paddles a kayak. Amen.
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