Word: boatmen
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...shimmers enticingly on the horizon, just 24 miles from Los Angeles. "Santa Catalina," says Coast Guard Lieut. Edward McGuire. "You can see it, and the distance seems perfect for a weekend's outing. Everybody makes a try for it, and lots fail: out of gas." In Miami, power-boatmen quickly learned that the local Coast Guard was giving away gas to those whose tanks went dry. "Until some of our skippers got tough and charged a fee," recalls a Coast Guardsman, "we were running a floating gas station...
...game, and even the neophytes usually get home in one piece. The water, contrary to legend, is more forgiving than, say, the thin air or a concrete abutment. Even so, the Coast Guard responded to 43,000 "Mayday"* distress calls last year, the vast majority of them from power-boatmen, who also accounted for 875 of the 1,312 deaths on the water...
...Bother. "At least 75% of the accidents could have been easily avoided by minuscule foresight," sighs Captain David Oliver of the Coast Guard in Chicago. "Mostly it's just plain stupidity." Seasoned boatmen still shake their heads over the youthful sport who recently went blasting around Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., with a water-skier in tow. Keeping his eyes on the skier, he slammed at 30 m.p.h. into a cabin cruiser, decapitating himself in the process. Equally foolish were the nine people who piled into a 16-ft. outboard and put to sea from York, Me., last June...
...Antisubmarine Warfare) forces. In a duel reminiscent of the fictional shoot-out in The Bedford Incident, a U.S. destroyer locks on the enemy boat and tracks his every move. Sometimes, to impress on the Soviets the futility of their plight, an American skipper will play The Volga Boatmen over and over again on his destroyer's underwater sound system until the ears of the Russian sonar operator are numbed by the noise and the Soviet sub is finally forced to surface...
Though free navigation courses are offered by the Coast Guard's Power Squadrons, Simonsen correctly guessed that many aspiring boatmen would prefer studying in their own homes, and at their own speed. To accommodate people who "want to buy a boat this winter and sail it to Hawaii next summer," he devised two simplified courses in celestial and coastwise navigation, both of which can be completed in as little as three months...