Should wearing a lifejacket be mandatory?

[Valiente]

Originally Posted by gimmellsdad

I think it's pretty funny how this same debate rang through about wearing seatbelts and how uncomfortable they are. This should be a no brainer.

Valiente-I've never heard it put so poetically. As a Canadian, I find it wierd driving through some states and seeing people riding their morotcycles without helmets.

The phrase "as one door closes, another opens" can be used in such cases.

My sister's on a liver transplant waiting list. Her odds of getting a donor would be better in the States not due to the supposed shortcomings of Canadian medicine (about which pundits and propagandists in the States are ignorant or frequently lie about), but because there are fewer Darwinian situations in Canada. Guess we are "freedom-haters".

[scottbr]

Lifejackets on smaller boats make sense. I have the kill switch for the dinghy attached to my life jacket and wear it. Just couple weeks ago a girl fell out of a dinghy and was hit by the motor as it kept running and came back around.

Wearing seatbelts makes sense, but most people did not wear them until made manditory. Bottom line they save lives and injuries for the most part are less severe than before seatbelts. Legislation not only reduced injuries / deaths but also reduced the cost to the health care system. We shouldn't have to pay for someones "right" to injure themselves needlessly when a simple device is available. ( without going overboard of course, with the wearing of helmets while walking debate)

The current discussion by the OPP is a reaction to the officers having to bring news to the families and is understandable, although is over reaction IMHO, to include larger boats.

[Valiente]

Originally Posted by davidpm

I do have a funny story about how peer pressure can work either way. One captain I crew for regularly has a 10 year old daughter. Every time we go out she noticed I wear a LV and her father does not. One time she asked me about it. I explained my reasons. She made her dad promise he would wear the life jacket at all times like I do.
Smart kid.

Next door to us is a relatively famous and solidly successful jazz musician (not a contradiction in terms in his case). He actually makes a decent living playing and recording. We both live on a fairly major and old inner city street with streetcar tracks. It's narrow to the point that the space between a parked car and a streetcar is maybe just over a metre (four feet or so). You can get "door prized" very easily in such a situation.

I saw him with his six-year-old daughter on a rear-wheel carrier seat of his bicycle (like me, they don't own a car). She was strapped in and helmeted. He was wearing a pork pie hat (remember, he's a cool jazz musician, right?)

I mentioned the "cognitive dissonance" of his strapping his daughter in, with helmet (this is the law for kids), while he went virtually bare-headed. He commented sheepishly that he didn't like helmets. I said that my grandfather didn't like seatbeats, but that my father liked being an orphan even less.

I wonder if my little story had any effect.

I didn't regularly wear a helmet until after the mid-80s. I was a bike courier, a fast, dangerous job akin to playing badminton on a high-wire. A guy got sideswiped in winter and went over his handlebars into one of the heavy grey metal streetside lockers the posties use to hang their bags and foulies for pickup and transfer of mail.

He didn't die, but he wasn't right again. The last time I saw him, he was furiously shouting at a basket he was trying, unsuccessfully, to weave. Or something equally in the "please kill me now" line.

So all you people who get revived after drowning, but are brain damaged and require your bottoms wiped...until you die 50 years from now...do I have the freedom to cut your irresponsible fecking throats to save the five million bucks wasted on keeping your stupid husk alive?

Where does "freedom from" factor in? The freedom to take one's chances doesn't happen in isolation. If it did, imagine what we could save on paramedics and SAR resources. "No seatbelt, Charlie, just let 'em bleed out".

[painkiller]

Just worry about yourself and your passengers. Stop trying to use the whole SAR/Rescue arguments to claim the right to interfere in people's lives. This can be taken too far. Wait until the government provides healthcare for all of us. Don't smoke! Don't eat red meat! After all, we all have to pay if you're ill!

[AE28]

Originally Posted by painkiller

Just worry about yourself and your passengers. Stop trying to use the whole SAR/Rescue arguments to claim the right to interfere in people's lives. This can be taken too far. Wait until the government provides healthcare for all of us. Don't smoke! Don't eat red meat! After all, we all have to pay if you're ill!

Yes, but those of us who drink red wine will get a special rebate on our Form 1040!!!

[pdqaltair]

I honestly believe that the risk of heat injury and the frequency of accidents due to heat-impared judment will out wieght the slight risk of drowning in a large boat in settled weather. A canoe or PWC is different. Bad weather is different. Night is different.

Starting from when my daughter was tiny, we didn't use PFDs on her, we used a harness and jacklines. I broke the law. I also felt it was safer, and that is all that mattered to me. I could see my girl was certainly going to get heat stroke, all insulated-up in the jacket. We used PFDs in the water and in small boats.

At night and in rough weather I would MUCH rather see harnesses than PFDs. Only an optimist believes a PFD will help a sailor on a lone night watch.

I hear all of the arguments and I won't dismiss them out of hand. I do not agree, however, that the requirment will increase the greater good, when everything is totaled up. Is freedom worth the death of a few and the rest of us paying the tab. Yes, as a nation, we believe it is. Where we draw our lines is the challenge.

I would like to see the option, for children, of a harness for any boat over a minimum size, perhaps 24 feet.

[hellosailor]

"do I have the freedom to cut your irresponsible fecking throats to save the five million bucks wasted on keeping your stupid husk alive?"
Yes, you do. Or rather, you would if you exercised the obligations and rights of a citizen more strenuously.

I wear seat belts because they seemed like a good idea, and because I've learned that I can walk out of what used to be a car if I do so. I wear a PFD because I love the water--and know it can outlast me. And I wear a bicycle helmet because a friend of mine got knocked down in a major biking rally many years ago, when helmets still came in one color (White) from one maker (Bell) and he spent several weeks in the hospital after his head slid into a curb stone.
On the other hand, I never wore one skiing and simply continue to believe that I won't be aiming for the trees.

I think people should have the freedom of choise to wear these things or not. And in any rational society, they would have that freedom while the rest of us were not forced to be responsible for them. For instance, there's a section at the base of most seat belts that deforms in an impact, so you can tell if they've been used. Slam into a pole, and the "witness" in the car says you weren't using your seat belt? Then your insurer should have the option of offering you a policy that says "No belt, no coverage" at a different price from the "belt, coverage, we pay" policy.

IT CAN BE DONE. And if not perfectly, at least done fairly well. You don't want to wear a PFD? A seat belt, a helmet? Great, sign a release and put it on an open national record. And when someone bags you & tags you, they can check the list and say "Ooops, no coverage on this one. He signed the list." Maybe that means no care, maybe it means cash care. All the rest is trivial--once someone forces the law to recognize individual freedom and responsibility and end the socialist facism.

[peikenberry]

Thanks Paul, I am one of the reg writers and enforcers that you mentioned. Not all (there certainly are some, mostly in the halls of Congress) are without commonsense. In my 34 years with the USCG I learned one thing very quickly, when it comes to small boats, there is very little common sense to go around. I use to have a quote over my desk when I was doing boating accident investigations that said "never underestimate the power of human stupidity!" (R. A. Heinlein)

I have been around boats of all sizes from dinghies to ships, all my life.. If I get in anything much less the 25 feet or so, I put on my lifejacket. I have my own which I keep in the trunk of my car. I know it fits. However, on larger vessels I may not wear it. It depends on the conditions. Here is where common sense comes in. Lifejackets should be put on at the first sign of impending danger. Most people don't do that. They are the ones who die because they didn't. Reviewing boating accident fatality investigations for 20 some years proves that.

However, I am not in favor of manadatory wearing for adults, but I am for children. Children simply do not have the wisdom to know when to wear and not to wear, and often neither do the adults around them. Why make the kids die for their parents mistake?

I am also in favor of mandatory wear for PWCs, Canoes, Kayaks, and just about anything under 13 feet long. Why those? Because that's where a lot of the fatalities occur.

Inflatables are a good option on the comfort issue. But they are damned expensive. I use a regular type three stearns vest.

However I am for requiring lifevests to be bright colors. Sometime when you are out in your boat throw something green, blue, or brown in the water that is about the size of a persons head, and back off 500 feet or so. Try spotting it with the naked eye. (it will be easier for you because you already know where to look) It's almost impossible from the water's surface and damned hard from a helicopter. Bright colors make all the difference. That's why lifeboats and other life saving apparatus are almost all international orange.

[bheintz]

Originally Posted by peikenberry

I have my own which I keep in the trunk of my car. I know it fits.

Just like fowl weather gear, it makes sense to bring your own PFD: you know it will fit, its condition, how to put it on, and you don't have to ask where it is.

I'm not in favor of mandatory use for any size vessels, but I often wear one.


Anyone want to explain why rowers in a crew shells are exempt, are they in less danger than competent dinghy sailors?

[Diva27]

Originally Posted by scottbr

Just couple weeks ago a girl fell out of a dinghy and was hit by the motor as it kept running and came back around.

An incident just happened last week in which a girl was run over on Georgian Bay and was rushed into Honey Harbour to hospital. Details are sketchy (police said the inflatable hit a wave and bounced the girl overboard) but it raises one related issue that drives me nuts: people in powerboats who let their kids sit on the bow with their legs dangling over the gunwale. I saw a family out the other day blasting around doing this and one of the kids must have been 4 years old. Kid was wearing a lifejacket, but that's not going to do much good when they fall in and the prop chops them into fish bait. A stupid, dangerous practice.