Remind me of something George Carlin once said. "Have you ever noticed, when you're driving, that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a "maniac"? "
I know everyone has an easy time trying to bang on people driving a different way than they do, but in the teams we learned a very important lesson.... "If you are the only one right... you are wrong".
I wish the folks I see out on the water would just pretend for a minute that there are other people out there. One of the reasons I tend to drive my boat, ride my motorcycle or drive my car "aggressively" is for the predictability of it. If you are passing people, they have little opportunity to hang out in your blind spot and turn into you. You are moving along, and as such can be through and around potential problems better than most can.
The most dangerous thing I see out there are people driving slowly and cluelessly, feeling irrationally that their slow speed means they can pretty much do whatever they want. Same with anchoring in an unsafe area, floating in a traffic stream, making violent turns to slow down, etc...
Another term I will coin from my time in the service is "Situational Awareness". I find that when moving right along, I tend to be very, very focused on what I am doing, and have a heightened amount of situational awareness, truncated to "SA" for those in the know.
Flame on, but I think that lollygagging in a congested area, driving on the wrong side of the river, putting yourself in a head-on condition with ANYTHING let alone another boat or making aggressive turns with no apparent consideration for other traffic is the most dangerous combination of boating faults on the water. I have found that most of the time something like that has been observed by me, it was someone just tooling around cluelessly, and rarely involved a high performance boat moving out.
So, to be serious for a minute, what do you all classify as the #1 most dangerous thing you can do on the water? Drinking and driving doesn't count. That isn't unsafe on it's own, it fosters a situation where you do unsafe things. What I am asking is, what is the most unsafe thing you can do on the water, regardless of sobriety?
My answer is simple. Anything unexpected. A right turn out of nowhere, coming to a complete stop for no reason, dropping off a ski rope in traffic because your arms are tired, doing a 360 on a Jet Ski in traffic, darting out perpendicular to the shoreline on a river, turning across traffic. You name it, 9 times out of 10 the most dangerous things you can do in my book are based in unpredictability, not illegality.
One of my basic rules of boating involves the concept that you should never take the right of way, only give it.
Nobody wants to be dead right.
To recap the question, "what is the most unsafe thing you can do on the water, regardless of sobriety?"