Your thoughts about watercraft really resonated with me! I've been a dedicated fisherman for large periods of my life, and a long-distance outdoor swimmer.

In both capacities, I grew to be very wary of speed boats and jet skies.

Once, about 20 years ago, I was on a fishing trip with my dad to Lake Okeechobee in south Florida, and we had a great time with our little boat and its little motor.

Then I left for Key West and a little parting. I got a call from Dad a couple days later. He had been 7 miles out into the swamps bordering the lake when a powerful boat with a 220 horsepower engine blasted past him and flipped him out of our little fishing boat.

The guys in the speed boat didn't even look back to see if he was in trouble. He was thrown out of the boat into a swamp crawling with alligators and venomous snakes. And being February, the weather was not warm, especially at night.

He told me it took him hours to work his way back to our boat, which had chugged away from him with our small 15 horse engine still running! And he could only do that because it got stuck in some reeds and then had run out of fuel.

If we had not been in the habit of keeping a spare can of fuel tied down in the boat, the consequences could have been dire. If the boat hadn't snagged itself on those reeds, he probably never would have been able to get back to it, and he probably would have died in the water.

And thing of it is, we had already been complaining about high-powered speedboats and their dangerous conduct — to ourselves and briefly to one of the coordinators of a bass fishing tournament whose participants owned all those speed boats. (We were staying at the same fishing resort that sponsored the tournament.)

That we didn't get a positive response is I guess par for the course.

The sport of bass fishing has so departed from its roots. Professionals and amateurs alike buy the biggest, fastest motors they can get so they can get from one fishing spot to another faster than their competitors.

And that often leaves traditional fishermen like my dad and me in a lot of discomfort and even danger.

I don't really get it. Today, I'm seeing bass fisherman gearing up with 250, 275, and even 300 horsepower motors.

They zoom around bucolic freshwater lakes, engines screaming, wakes a mile high.

Tell me how that makes any sense?