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Originally Posted by Fat Jack
You selectively highlighted the wrong part of my quote if this was the point you were trying to emphasize. How about when I said "They...certainly all pose some danger, but I don't think they are nearly as dangerous to other boaters ".
As dangerous as my aunt might in fact be, I'm sure that even you would have to agree that your chances of survival would be much better with her hitting you at 22mph in her pontoon boat, than with that 12000 pound torpedo-shaped cigarette boat hitting you at 90mph (not that there's anything wrong with cigarette boats). If you don't have the honesty to admit even this, let's not bother.
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I was trying, apparently unsuccessfully, to use your "aunt" as a metaphor for a more typical boat. So let me be more precise ... instead of your aunt in a pontoon boat doing 22 we consider an average lake boat going an average speed, how about 21' and 35 mph ? Now take that boat and ram it into, or over, your own. Would you try to tell me that this is somehow not life threatening ? If you want to claim that the cigarette boat is worse, OK fine, but it's a difference w/o a distinction. I say once the probability of injury or death is sufficiently high, and I claim it would be in this example, then discussions about how much more deadly the other boat is are silly. The chances of survival now depend a lot on the random particulars of the crash, where one boat hits another, where you are sitting, etc. In the same league, I would say yes. I wouldn't be arguing that a speed limit should be enacted to increase survivability in the rare occurance of a collision. Honest enough ?
Moreover I look at the issue of drunk boating, your slow aunt vs fast macho guy, this way. At pretty much any speed above NWS the drunk boater is a menace. I have no reason to believe the % of drunks vary between a "slow" group and a "fast" group. The "fast" boats make up less than 5% of the boating population. What % of boaters are BUI I can't say. Somehow it seems to me that I should be worried about the 95% more than the 5%. In any trip across the lake I'm more likely to run into a problem from the 95% than from the 5%.