This means nothing
the stats seem pretty solid to me.
in 2016 they were:
Where cause of death was known, 80% of fatal boating accident victims drowned. Of those drowning victims with reported life jacket usage, 83% were not wearing a life jacket.
I think the statistics are even more compelling because there were life jacket wearers who died from hypothermia so that skews the stats a little. However, I'm sure they would have died from drowning if they hadn't had their jackets on.
Serval years ago I read a report about speed in this relationship to fatal accidents. I don’t recall the exact details now But the figures were horrific. It was clear that driving fast would lead to an early expiration.
However, a reporter looked at all of the reports that fed into the statistical data base and came up with a different story. Apparently, at the time, Police attributed accidents to a primary, secondary, or tertiary reason. Oddly enough almost every accident was attributed to access speed. So, someone suddenly find them self on a patch of sheet ice going 15 miles an hour and falling off a cliff would be attributed to excess speed. What is speed the cause of the Fidelity or was it the sheet ice that suddenly appeared. Clearly speed played a role but was not the cause of the accident.
Well I am a big believer that statistics can teach us a lot, I think one has to look at more than the gross data to really understand. Buried in the Center for disease control‘s numbers on Boating gas, a mirror 330 or so a year, is a lot of data that we do not understand. Blaming the all these deaths on wearing or not wearing a life jacket is fairly simplistic.
I maintain, that I am the best judge of when it is necessary to wear a life jacket. No one. Not anyone. Is a better judge of that than me. To think that I would have to stand before a judge for exercising my superior judgment is beyond belief. I believe lifejackets have a place. I have used them many times. But I do not have to be told when or how to use them. How do you think that I would be fined because of some long which thinks it has better idea of the situation that I have is incredible to me.
I believe lifejackets have a place. I have used them many times. But I do not have to be told when or how to use them. I do think that I would be fined because of some long which thinks it has better idea of the situation that I have is incredible to me.
Call me jaded but I think if people are not smart enough to wear lifejackets when they onto then let them drown.