Hey Dave,

...this crap is trickling down into boating, as well. With the increasing reliance on electronics at the helm, if you're sailing anywhere near other boaters, you really have to be more defensive than ever before...

I had an eye-opening experience last year, running a big Sea-Ray from Lauderdale up to Canada with the owner and his son aboard, a classic example of how easy it is to get distracted by all the toys and gadgets most boats now have aboard...

We were running one day from St. Augustine to Charleston, a straight shot that put us about 40 miles off the Georgia seacoast. Flat calm day, I went down below for a few minutes, make some more coffee... When I come back up on the bridge, both of these guys have their faces glued to the 20" computer monitor at the helm, playing with the Sirius weather function, checking out the radar picture of thunderstorms moving across Georgian Bay near their home, 700 miles away...

Dead ahead of us about 300 meters ahead, was a small center console fishing boat dead in water, bottom fishing near a wreck, there were a couple of other boats milling around the vicinity as well... You could tell it was finally beginning to dawn upon the guys in the small boat that this yacht barrelling along at 22 knots might literally be "Not Under Command", and these guys were so intent on playing with their computer, I'm not sure they ever would have seen the boat ahead...

later on in the trip, when we get up onto the Hudson and the Erie Canal, they were both in full-on Blackberry mode... As you know, the greatest pleasure of that trip is how much there is to see along the shore... They saw very little of it, it was the first time I've ever spent that amount of time with someone who uses a Blackberry, they were fiddling with them non-stop, all day long, the only breaks came when we were doing the locks, and they'd have to go on deck to handle lines.... UFB...

best regards,

Jon