Thanks to everyone for all of your replies. This is very good information.
It sounds like my little family will be spared the inconvenience of having
to try to right their boat, but I have a sneaking suspicion that one or two
of them will wind up taking an involuntary swim anyway. I'll have to work
on it.
Thanks again.
-Ken



"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 01:06:55 GMT, "K" wrote:

Hi. I'm looking to the experts (the boating experts, not the political
experts) for some technical help with a writing project I'm working on.
Say there's a small, open, no frills, 12 or 13 foot boat with an outboard
motor. In the boat are two adults and their ten year-old son. Assume
that
the boat is sitting stationary in relatively calm waters (bay or harbor),
and that there's no water inside the boat. How likely is it that the
three
of them might capsize it if they were to all simultaneously put a foot up
on
the same side of the hull with most of their weight? Maybe they were
all
reaching out for something. Would they flip the whole thing over and
get
dumped in the water? Is that conceivable? Likely? Doubtful?
Any thoughts welcome.

Interesting question.

The answer that comes to mind is probably not. The instinctive
reaction to rolling a boat over is to lean away from the direction of
the tilt. However, it would be possible to fall out of the boat
without the boat flipping over due to instability. And, just for the
record, if they were all drunk, or fooling around, it probably could
be done, but just stepping on the gunwale it's unlikely.

I have a small '87 12 foot Starcraft that is very tippy and I'm a big
guy, but I've never even come close to rolling it over even being
stupid by leaning out of it to land a fish.

Later,

Tom

"Beware the one legged man in a butt
kicking contest - he is there for a
reason."

Wun Hung Lo - date unknown