Issue 17 : Mar/Apr 2001
We never meant to be the poster children for “National Life Jacket Safety Week,”* but then, no poster child chooses to star in this sort of event. Jerry started it. He fell out of one dinghy too many even before I knew him. And I remember rescuing a skipper who fell out of his boat and was not wearing a life jacket. That took both of us out of the race.
When we started cruising on Lake Superior, we already had the habit developed. You wear your life jacket when the boat is underway. Period. Just as we had been doing in dinghy races. The air is usually cold, or at least cool, as it blows over that 50-degree lake, so wearing a life jacket is not uncomfortable. Besides, we filled the pockets with jack knives, whistles, flares, and strobes. You don’t get much time in that water. We wanted to hasten our recovery, should the unthinkable happen. We even added rings and a harness for hauling our freezing bodies from the drink.
It got to be such a habit that we felt a bit undressed without our life jackets. (Sort of the way it feels to drive without a seat belt, once you’ve been wearing one for years.) So sometimes we forgot to take the life jackets off at the dock on short missions. We’ve been caught in the marina restrooms still wearing our life jackets, or refueling the boat without being aware that we were fully protected from drowning by our life jackets. That was probably when our reputation as life-jacket poster children began.
But now that we have this reputation, let me say simply that life jackets (like seat belts) probably do save lives. Sailboat decks are unstable at the best of times, and it’s hard to be as graceful as a gazelle with every step you take on a boat. We wear ours, we encourage guests on our boat to wear theirs. Yet we don’t believe there should be a law mandating that all boaters wear life jackets. The choice is theirs.
*No, this is not a real week, not that we know of anyway, and we’re not actually official poster children of anything. Certainly it’s been a long time since we were children!
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
