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From: C. Marin Faure (no email)
Date: Thu Feb 02 2006 - 02:58:41 EST
I don't agree with Capt. Maurice's comment that requiring training,
testing, and licensing for boaters won't accomplish much. I do agree that
it won't completely eliminate incompetent, inconsiderate, dangerous, or
ignorant boaters. I know pilots who have gone through all the training and
testing and gotten their certficates, yet I will not set foot in an
airplane they are piloting. Some are simply well-meaning but incompetent
pilots and some are downright dangerous. A licence is not an automatic
indicator of competence, it simply means the person passed the required
tests.
But I have seen many boaters ask questions or do things that indicate they
simply have not been exposed to the right information, or the right way to
operate some aspect of their boat. They aren't stupid or inconsiderate or
blatantly opposed to training or education--- they simply don't know.
Boats, like airplanes, are not inherently dangerous but they are
unforgiving. Make a mistake in maneuvering or navigation and the
consequences can be severe and irreversible. People do not set out in a
boat with the idea of going aground, sinking, or putting their lives at
risk. Sometimes things end up this way because of stupid behavior. But
perhaps more often than not things end up this way because the person in
command simply did the wrong thing through ignorance or by making the wrong
decision thinking it was the right one.
There are two ways to stack the odds in your favor when operating a boat,
plane, etc. One is learn by your mistakes. This works great as long as
the mistakes don't sink the boat or kill you. The other is to be trained
to operate a boat correctly from the outset. Outfits like the Navy seem to
feel this is the better way to go.
In course of gathering information for my current book project I spent the
last fifteen years or so learning as much as I could about WWII PT boats
and their crews. Not only was there a formal PT training school in
Melville, Rhode Island that all PT crewmembers and officers went through,
but training went on constantly in the field. Imagine what the end result
would be if instead of this plan, they simply turned an 80' PT over to 11
guys who may or may not have had any boating experience and said, "have at
it." Which is what happens when most people buy a boat. My wife and I
bought a 36-foot, 27,000-pound, twin-engine trawler. The only requirement
we had to meet was the price. Nobody even showed us how to start the
engines, let alone how to anticipate how the boat would act as power was
reduced in a strong crosswind as we approached the one empty spot at a dock.
We've been lucky so far--- we haven't hit anything hard enough to do any
damage. But there have been many, many times where we easily could have
made a simple wrong decision or miscalculation and gotten into serious
trouble. In many cases the consequences of our actions would not have been
based on a mental role of the dice had I been required to be trained on the
handling, maneuvering, etc. aspects of operating our boat.
The challenge of operating a boat, plane, or vehicle is not the physical
manipuation of the controls. From a physical point of view an airplane is
incredibly easy to fly and a boat is incredibly easy to make go through the
water. I would be willing to bet that you could put just about every
skipper on this list at the controls of a 3,600 horsepower, 80' Elco PT
boat and that person could make the boat go forward, back up, and turn. I
was able to do that with an RNLI 47' motor lifeboat in the UK the other
year. But what I lacked was the knowledge of the boat's systems, the
knowledge of how the boat would react in an almost infinite number of
conditions, and the judgement to do everything from accurately calculating
how fast the boat would slow down approacing a dock when the power was
reduced to deciding how to take a large wave.
I'm not saying that training and testing can accomplish everything people
like Capt. Maurice have learned from years of experience. There is no way
it can do this. Nor will it eliminate the process of learning from
mistakes. But like pilot training, it will give a boater a huge head start
on how to operate a boat correctly and intelligently, and it will provide a
solid foundation on which to build using experience and ongoing learning.
Will an effective required training and testing program mean that all
boaters will be competent? Of course not. Despite all the initial
training and ongoing field training, there were PT skippers and crewmembers
who had no busines being on the boats, and boats and lives were lost as a
result of this.
I believe Arild's comments about the difficulties of establishing any sort
of meaningful and effective training, testing, and licensing system for
boaters are right on. But the difficulty of getting an effective program
created and implemented is a separate issue from whether or not a good
training and testing program would do any good. We assume that it won't
work, that people will ignore it, that they'll figure out a way to get
around it, and that boating safety won't be improved.
All I can do is point to aviation. The training and testing program works,
people who want to be pilots can't ignore it, they can't get around it, and
while it's true there are people who crash airplanes, the aviation safety
record is excellent. Certainly vastly better than if people could simply
plunk down the money for an airplane and "have at it."
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, Washington
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