This past summer, the Coast Guard cutter Vise was resetting day marker #20 on an especially busy day on Florida's Blackburn Bay, along the Intracoastal Waterway north of Venice. Allan Horton, a Boater in Nokomis, Florida, noted that boats of all descriptions kept passing Vice with, at best, a token reduction in speed.

As the Coast Guard crew worked to install the new marker, they were continually being tossed around by the wakes. The Vice's captain responded by sounding the five-beat emergency signal several times. Remarkably, very few skippers seemed to slow down or even notice.

Horton, who describes himself as a frequent fist shaker whenever his boat is rocked, says he understands the Coast Guard captain's frustration. So do a lot of other skippers; wakes make people angry. Lt. Scott Olson of the Florida Marine Patrol says he's been rocked quite a few times himself, even when his boat was in no wake zones. It doesn't make him angry, however, because he says most people don't realize their boats were creating a large wake. Olson is a patient man; he says he turns on his blue light and "educates” them.

Depending on the county in Florida, the cost to learn how to reduce the size of your wake can cost $90 - $140.

At 21, she was the youngest woman to sail around the world alone, and her inspirational book, "Maiden Voyage," went on to become an international best-seller, selected in 1990 as a "Best Book For Young Adults" by the American Library Association. Now, 20 years later, living in Vermont, Tania Aebi is a divorced mother of two teens, hoping to give her boys a taste of something other than video games and paintball. So the trio set sail for a year – the boys a little shell-shocked at first – and made it all the way to the South Pacific. This mom gave her kids precious gifts – family time together, a world view, and a sense of responsibility. But there were plenty of bumps along the road.

There we were, my oldest son, Nicholas, and me, driving along Route 2 through rural Maine on the way to the coast. It seemed like yesterday that I'd been driving him to kindergarten. Now, here we were, headed out to look at colleges along with thousands of other '09 high school graduates and parents. This rite of passage had snuck up on us quite soon after he'd dropped anchor for the last time on Shangri La, the boat that had sailed our family across thousands of miles of ocean.

When I'd just turned 18, and my father was escorting me through a somewhat less traditional transition from high school to college, our road led down the New Jersey Turnpike to the Annapolis boat show to find the vessel that would guide me through Ocean U. Over the next two and- a-half years, I sailed around the world by myself, my father's loony idea of an ideal education, far away from the tree-lined campus paths and structure I now envisioned for Nicholas. Fortunately for my dad, I lived to tell the tale.

I had married another sailor I'd met out there pretty soon after my circumnavigation ended in New York, and life veered toward the predictable – becoming mother to two sons, lecturer, writer, co-owner of a small sailboat flotilla business. Over the years, between raising kids, working, getting divorced, and going back to college, our routines centered around school, piano lessons, tae kwon do, visitation, family trips. All along, though, an idea tugged at me. I always imagined that one day I'd pull my boys out of their comfort zone and introduce them to my old teacher, the sea. I wanted them to experience a little of my best schooling, to open doors to new thinking for themselves. The year I turned 40, the age my mother was when she died, I realized that all these dreams were just that – dreams! I'd never done anything about them. And now the boys were almost launched, and any parental influence I might wield with them was diminishing by the minute.