A good eye opener for this is to learn to barefoot (waterski with no skis). For those who have never tried it, here's a quick overview. For a deep water start, you hook your toes over the line, lay back in the water and get drug until the boat gets up enough speed for you to sit up, then stand up.

All this sounds good except once you start moving through the water you start getting pushed under. Your immediate reaction is to sit up to try to get air. By sitting up toward the surface, the water flow now forces you under water... very far under water. To get to the surface, you have to do the opposite of what your brain is telling you to do... arch your back as far as you can and that brings you to the top. The toughest part of this whole process is from 5 to about 15/20 mph. At those speeds you have to hold your breath because you don't have a big enough pocket of air above your head to breath. Once you're going faster than that, the water is starting to get firmer, you have a bigger air pocket and you can start to sit up a little.

I don't think too many of our cats when unmanned with a person dragging behind is going to accelerate past 20 mph to enable the tethered skipper to do a deep water barefoot start... or even a$$ skip across the water.

I suspect that being drug behind a ski boat would help a lot of you decide whether or not you really want to be tied to a boat doing 10 or 15 mph. Don't forget to try feet first too, just so you know what it will be like if you're tied on a little lower than your armpits.

This is starting to get wordy but one more thing to try. Remember the part about hooking your toes over the ski rope to get started... when falling off a cat, you won't have the luxury of first hooking your toes, then telling the driver to "hit it". So just for giggles (or gurgles), try starting without your feet over the line, then once you're moving try getting your feet through the water and hooked back on the line so you can arch your back and plane to the top of the water.

Yes, there is a chance that the weight of the tethered skipper will tip the boat over, but I sure wouldn't want to be that person hooked to the boat by a line that I can't let go of.

That said, for you guys on bigger water, I don't know what the right answer is, but for me on my smaller inland lakes... I always have a life vest and at least a wet suit on, I'll drift/swim to one of the heavily populated shores where I can call for help from some vacationers house. I'll worry about getting the pieces of my boat back after I'm on dry ground.