Remember safety first on the water

Two weeks ago, I read that there had been had been a boat accident on the north half of the lake.

The news outlets had a story about two people being close to a motor boat in the water and that the girl and her father were critically injured by the propeller while tubing on Skaneateles Lake.

This occurred on July 6. The paper reported on July 21 that, after some touch and go moments, the girl has been saved and is now stable.

She’ll be out of the hospital in a week or two. The dad’s injury was less severe and he was released from the hospital after a few days.

I have been extensively involved with motorboat work, servicing sailboat racing for 30 to 40 years.

When a sailboat overturns, the crew gets dumped into the lake and the boat is usually full of water and it is sometimes inverted. The first job is to get the people out of the lake and into a rescue boat.

The guiding principle is to shut off the engine when approaching anybody swimming near your location of operation. Putting the drive in a neutral is not sufficient.

There are no brakes on the driveshaft and the shaft still turns most of the time when the drive is shifted into neutral. It does not have the power to move the boat, but it can still seriously injure the folks in the water.

Many boaters think that it is appropriate to pick up swimmers or water skiers in neutral.

If drivers can keep the back of the boat away from the swimmers, that is just marginally OK.

However, wind, water currents, waves, or other boats can cause those people in the water to move close to the powered prop at the back of your boat. This is what happened on July 6.

As a result, the girl lost her left leg above the knee and her left arm above the elbow. She almost died in the trauma, but was saved. Because of tragedies like this, I think everyone operating a powered boat should adopt the practice of turning off the engine when people are in the water near the back of the boat.

I have assisted capsized sailboats many times during races and surprise storms on the lake. A hull sometimes has to be righted in order to tow it ashore and force enough water out of the boat while towing to be able to bail it out when you get close to shore.

Needless to say, you have to use extreme caution so as not to injure swimmers in the water when assisting the rescue of the sailboat. I have been doing this since the middle 50s at camps, regattas, and after surprise storms. The safety of the swimmers is always the priority and boats come last.

Reading the article in the Auburn Citizen it is obvious that the driver of the motorboat, regarding the injury issue, demonstrated no experience in how to do a rescue or how to pick up swimmers from a boat.

If you take water skiers out, be sure that you know how to pick them up safely out of the water and practice the manoeuver in June each summer when the season starts.

The water can be so cold before July 15 that it can be hard to get people back into the boat after some calamity.