By Bob Currie, Recreational Boating Safety Specialist
U. S. Coast Guard Auxiliary Station Galveston Flotilla
Although the Pink Floyd song ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ is one of my favorites, and the “We don’t need no education” line in the song is universally known, the 2023 Recreational Boating Accident Statistics show that recreational boaters really do need education. This article will reinforce that idea.

Boater Education Statistics

We Know What We Don’t Know
The point we are trying to make here is that a lack of boater safety education is a common factor in a high percentage of recreational boating accidents. So, from a statistical standpoint it is quite disheartening looking at this table to see that we do not have education information on a very high percentage of accidents. Here are the data I am talking about:

When you look at the data using only these two categories, you see that there are 295 deaths and 611 injuries for which we don’t know what type of education, if any, the operator had. That’s 52% of the deaths and 29% of the injuries for which we have no boater education data. While the official Coast Guard statistics focus on the known, I propose that we can establish ranges for the three categories (Vessels Involved, Deaths, and Injuries). Instead of just focusing on the known, we can add the “No Education” and “Unknown” categories together, and make that the top of the range of operators with no education, with the original “No Education” being the bottom of the range. Here is what that would look like:

Total Deaths with Known Operator Instruction

The above is the official Coast Guard table, just looking at deaths. They combined all of the known types of instruction and looked at the total deaths for the known types of instruction, ignoring the unknown figures, and uses 262 as the base for the following pie chart:

So, of the deaths by known operator instruction, 77.1% of the operators had no instruction. I determined a range of 36% to 88% by combining the known with the unknown. Those are true percentages, with the bottom of the range (36%) assuming that all of the operators in the unknown instruction category had some boater education, and the top of the range (88%) assuming that none of the operators in the unknown category had some boater education.

Just a Flip of the Coin
One thing I learned in my Statistics class is if you flip a coin enough times, you will come up with a useful statistic; that is, half the time it will come up heads and half the time it will come up tails. You can use this as a basic assumption when comparing two variables of more or less equal probability of happening. In this case, I am taking the Unknown Instruction category and comparing the two possibilities, Boater Education versus No Boater Education, and assigning a 50% probability to both. That changes the numbers on my table to look like this:

This basic assumption pins the ranges down quite a bit, and is quite a reasonable assumption to make, statistically. However, the Known Education category establishes a pattern that can be used to further apply the unknown category to the whole. The percentage of deaths by known operator education is 77.1 %. In the next table I incorporate 75% of the Unknown category into the Known category. Here are the results:

Summary
If you compare the Coast Guard table and pie chart showing the number of deaths by operator boating instruction where the type of instruction (or lack thereof) is known with the tables adding 50% and 75% of the unknown category, you will see that the pattern established by the known categories of instruction probably applies equally to the unknown category. We know that 77.1 percent of the operators in the known category had no boater education. By extrapolating this pattern to the unknown category, we see that the unknown category results, when added to the known category, produce a very similar percentage (77.1% Known Category vs.75% Known Category plus 75% Unknown category).

The bottom line is this: We know that in 202 of the total 564 recreational boating accident deaths the operator had no boating safety education. By using the pattern established by the known deaths, we can estimate that of the 295 deaths where the operator’s boating education was unknown that 221 of the deaths involved an operator with no boating safety education. This gives a grand total of 423 deaths (75%) most likely in which the operator had no boater safety education.

Also of particular note is that there was only one death in which the operator had taken a Coast Guard Auxiliary boater safety course. Learn how to survive- take a boater safety course.

[BC: Jun-25-2024]