Ric wrote:
The most dangerous part of any "dangerous sport", whether sailing,
scuba-diving, climbing etc, is driving in your car to get there....


A curious statement - it almost seems reasonable. How does it apply
to boating in general?

There are about 180 million cars in the US, and 12 million registered
boats, so the ratio is 15 to one. The number of boating fatalities is
around 700, but this doesn't include drowning while swimming off a
boat which is a substantial factor, so I will exercise some
prerogative and call it an even 1000 deaths. There are 30000 auto
related deaths, so that ratio is 30 to one.

Thus, when counted by registered vehicles, auto fatalities are twice
as frequent. However, the story gets muddied by the fact that human
powered boats (canoes, kayaks, rowboats) are not registered in most
situations, yet are involved in a substantial number of fatalities.
This tends to make boating seem even safer, vehicle by vehicle.

The bottom line is that if you have a car and a boat, you're more
likely to die in the car. However, if you consider that most boaters
only use a small portion of their driving time going to their boat, I
would guess that on a given "boating day" the boating portion is more
dangerous.

There is a whole other side to this, however. Those of us with larger
sailboats know that our boats are far, far safer than the small boats
that seem to cause all the problems. For example, we have stays to
hang onto when we pee overboard! Does this hold up? Auxiliary
sailboats make up about 1.2% of the fleet, but were involved in only
1.2% of the fatalities. Hmmm. OK, well at least larger boats must
safer: 4.6% of the registered fleet is over 26 feet, and 5% of the
fatalities involved boats over 26 feet. Hmmm.

One thing is clear when looking at the statistics: most deaths occur
from "stupid" behavior. "Overall, carelessness/reckless operation,
operator inattention, operator inexperience, and excessive speed are
the leading contributing factors of all reported accidents."

http://www.uscgboating.org/statistic...stics_2004.pdf