Quote:
Originally Posted by NH_boater
It is too much to hope that, now ANY captain will think twice before consuming any alcohol or other impairing substance when on the water. Temping as it might be, I will not have a drink or drinks and pilot my boat around the lake. I cannot understand why a boater can openly drink and pilot a boat around legally with a beer in his hand, while this is illegal on our roads. Many people fail to see the 'operating a potentially fatal multi-ton vehicle with no brakes' aspect of boating. ........Just fun and games when on the water.
Most of us has seen groups of people at the sandbars consuming drink after drink, and then go blasting across the lake. I worry less about them and more about the responsible boating family they are about to plow into.
Most of the drinkers, I fear, will shrug this off as, poor bastard, it won't happen to me.
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I'll be the opposing view here.
My wife and I very much enjoy loading into the boat late afternoon/evening, cocktail in hand for a slow (usually about headway speed) cruise around the lake at sunset. At any point in time, I expect that I would still pass a DUI test, and I'd hate to see one of these simple life pleasures restricted due to the minority of boneheads.
Do I agree with you about the ones who spend the day chugging on the sandbar, absolutely? Would we still enjoy the cruise without the drink? Of course, but not as much. It's one of life's simple pleasures, that done correctly, causes no harm.
As always, the problems come enforcement and associated costs. Ideally, my response would be to target the aforementioned boneheads and make the penalties more severe. But that would assume there are enough resources to enforce this. But completely eliminating on board alcohol would face similar enforcement challenges.