Citizen Article - The Other Side

[Mee-n-Mac]

Originally Posted by overlook

Just so you know, I would not be traveling at a high rate of speed where any person with any sense would be swimming. When I travel at a high rate I increase the distance of safe passage 4x. At 100 I can pick out a loon at over 1300 feet.

Apart from all the sniping recently there's a couple of good points contained in the above. First is the argument that swimmers are endangered by speed in excess of 45 mph. Frankly 45 is waaay to fast if you're in the vicinity of swimmers. So the question then arises is how do you know if people are swimming in your vicinity. Overlook is correct in that there's some natural division between fast boats and swimmers that occurs when the operator is using good judgement. When he/she isn't using good judgement then I don't see HB-162 as really helping all that much. I've watched Capt B. motor past (maybe doing 30) the stern of a boat picking up a tuber. How to find a way to define and "punish" the bad operator is a better question than other's I've seen posed. Second I will again mention sightlines. When you have sufficient sightlines you can operate safely at "high" speeds. While slower buys you more time to perceive and react, once you have enough time it (more time to react) becomes a marginal issue. Littlefield had more than enough time to react and still didn't, for reasons we all can speculate on.