Beginning this weekend, and continuing all summer, DEM conservation officers will hand out free ice cream cone certificates donated by Newport Creamery to children they see wearing life jackets while boating. The children will also be given a DEM Division of Enforcement Junior Safe Boater card to sign and carry, pledging to always wear a life jacket when boating. Six winning posters, selected from more than 100 submitted, will be reproduced and distributed to marinas, yacht clubs, campgrounds, beach areas, and other areas of high density boating where their messages will reach thousands of children and adults. DEM Director Andy McLeod said the campaign was aimed at reaching children at an early age. If they develop the habit of wearing life jackets early on, it will stay with them always, just as wearing a bicycle helmet, or using a seat belt, becomes automatic.
Life jackets save lives.
It's that simple. Eight out of ten boating fatalities, he added, occur on boats where the operator has no boating safety education. Four hundred of those boaters could have been saved if they had been wearing life jackets. In Rhode Island, children under the age of 11 must wear an approved life jacket while riding in any vessel less than 26 feet long on any waters in the state. Children who submitted winning posters, their parents and teachers, and representatives of the Greenwich Bay Power Squadron, the US Coast Guard Auxiliary, and the Rhode Island Marine Trades Association joined DEM's McLeod at the 3 p.m. ceremony announcing the winners.