Wear you lanyards !!!! (Kill Switches)

Saturday night (Sunday Morning) at about 12 midnight we were heading north on the Intercoastal Waterway after having dinner at a resturaunt in Clearwater Beach. Just past the Dunedin Causeway Bridge we spot a boat in front of us going in circles. After shinning the spot light on the boat we see it is a mid size fishing cat with a channel marker lodged in between the sponsons with the number 22 showing on the triangular red sign........no one was on board. As we watched the boat turn circles running at about half throttle we notified Coast Guard and scanned the water for bodies while keeping the light on the boat to alert other vessels. I have to tell you the uneasy feeling in your stomach seeing the boat running in circles with no one on board and trying to find a body or bodies in the black water in the pitch balck night. After trying to come up with a recovery plan on how the tides were running and the winds so we could begin some type of search for a body (bodies), a boat pulls to our side and says he picked up the (1) person and he is on the nearby island with some pretty bad facial injuries. He was lucky, very lucky !!!!! Wear your lanyards people !!!! Dave

Scary for sure. I for one am not a huge fan of boating after dark

A kill switch lanyard is one of those things that's tough to get your hands on while being ejected from your boat in the dark. The other one is a life jacket.

Amen. I've watched a ton of video of boats making speed runs over 100MPH and you can see the kill switch lanyard flying around in the breeze and no life jacket. WTF? I end the video right there. Cool boat dude but you're an idiot.

I don't boat at night anymore! I also wear the lanyard 100% and jackets 90% of the time. When I was younger I didn'tknow better...

Same here. But even when I was younger I would at least do jackets at night.
Once I ran a buddy's boat (big sea ray) back maybe 20 miles down the west end of lake erie in the dark with an enclosed bridge and literally saw NOTHING. For 20 minutes. I had a second person on watch and I tried to keep my speed down, but had to run from memory. I had rpms, time, and compass. So I ran for a known channel and we watched for collisions.

Now I am no night running, jacket in the day. Funny how things change.