On Jan 15, 10:56�pm, "CalifBill" wrote:
http://www.boatingmag.com/article.asp?


Four stroke outboard fans will find the final paragraph of that
article extremely interesting.

Regulators love to target boats as significant contributors to air and
water pollution, when in reality that is more often not the case.
There are so few boaters that passing a law to "clean up boating"
doesn't cost anybody enough votes to matter, but the general public
(typically envious of the "rich snobs" who can afford a boat) wants to
see some sort of action taken to clean up the environment. Most
members of the general public would rather see that action taken
against somebody else. Boaters are a perfect target.

Average private automobile usage is said to be about 18,000 miles per
year. Assuming that there is a mixture of freeway driving and time
spent
creeping through traffic jams factored into that total it might be
reasonable to guess that the average speed a private auto travels is
40 mph. If my car is "averge", it probably runs for 450 hours per
year. Add an hour a week for idling at stop signs, red lights, etc,
and the typical family car is probably up to about 500 hours per year.

In my county, there are almost two million registered cars and light
duty pickup trucks. There could be 1-billion automobile operating
hours per year, in one county alone.

There are 35,000 boats registered as "cabin cruisers" in my entire
state. There are another 100,000 or so registered as "runabouts". For
purposes of my example, let's move every single one of those boats
into my home county, imagining that they are *all* gasoline powered
and that none of the runabouts has an outboard. Two absurd
assumptions, but it dramatizes my point.

135,000 boats operating an average of 100 hours per year (generous,
many run a lot less) will log 1,350,000 hours- or less than 15% of the
automotive total. Now spread the boats back into the counties where
they actually originate, add in the cars and trucks registered in all
of those counties, and I'd be surprised if pleasure boat exhaust
accounted for more than a percent or so of all air pollution.

Point being, even if they took every boat off the water entirely- (and
that may be the goal of some of these fanatics)- the decrease in air
pollution would be almost immeasurable. In fact, assuming that the ex-
boaters decided to buy an extra car and or go for a Sunday drive
instead of a weekend cruise, total air pollution would be more likely
to go up, rather than down.