It is very exhilirating speeding across the open sea in your power boat, speed boat or motor boat but please heed this warning …

If no one can see you, no one can come to your rescue if you get in to difficulties!

Hopefully you will have your boat engine properly serviced and maintained and it will be reliable and dependable. But things can go wrong. If your engine should stop and not re-start and you are far out at sea and out of sight, you’ve got a problem.

When out in my speed boat I always keep as close to the shore as it is safe to do so for me, my boat and other sea-users. This proved to be a very wise strategy when my boat engine stalled. I couldn’t restart it and the off-shore breeze started to blow us out to sea.

Because we were fairly close to the shore, there were plenty of other boats about. We were able to paddle to a boat that was anchored and tie our boat to it. This prevented us from drifting until a passing boat kindly towed us to shore.

If we had been further out when our engine stalled, we wouldn’t have been able to paddle to another boat and no-one would have been passing to tow us back in.

So always keep as close to the shore as it is safe to do so.