[Island Life]

No, Dave, you know I don't mean to do away with defensive driving. Don't twist words into ridiculous conclusions to serve your own point.

What I'm saying is that sometimes we have to slow down and give way to high-performance boats because they are going to cross in front of our bow whether they have the right of way or not, simply because they have the horse-power to do it. That is what I mean by driving-defensively: collision avoidance. I've seen several boats slow down to a near stop to avoid colliding with a fast, give-way that had gunned it across their bow. If they hadn't done so, they would have passed within feet of the other boat (at best). And what if the faster boat had slowed down as it was crossing the slower boat's bow? Collision.


These boaters were not causing the problems, they were avoiding otherwise inevitable accidents - and, I believe, this is what we were discussing: why there are fewer accidents even though it sometimes like the Wild West out there.