It is unsettling indeed to think that denial is such a powerful force in our culture. So powerful that people will deny a clear and present danger and hesitate to do the simplest things to save their own lives or the lives of people close to them.

And I'm not just thinking of the denial in the cottage that night.

I'm also thinking of the kinds of denial that one sees in boats all the time… even among many experienced skippers, who sometimes deny the need to follow what they think of as someone else's rules.

The best skippers don't deny risk, they expect it and plan for it.

I'm also talking about the denial that's so rampant among casual boaters. That denial which says, "I'm not really a boater. I don't need to take a course or wear a PFD or check the weather. I'm just going fishing three minutes away at the edge of the lake."

Denial - from expert boaters, from casual boaters, and from onlookers, even from the boating industry - is responsible for many of the deaths we are all working so hard to prevent.

The third thing that sealed their fate was cold. Let me be very clear: I am not just talking about hypothermia from long term immersion, I'm talking about the short term effects of even moderately cold water. The well known British researcher Michael Tipton defines cold water as anything less than 70 degrees. And this isn't just about Canada either. It's about almost every body of water in North America.

As everyone knows, hypothermia can kill you by lowering your core body temperature.

Fewer people know about cold shock - or the "gasp reflex". This happens in only 30 seconds. And it happens in water that is as warm as 59° Fahrenheit (15° C). That's the average temperature of one of the Great Lakes in July.

Everyone - from an overweight person to an Olympic swimmer - has the same reflex. The minute you fall in the water, the gasp reflex of cold shock makes you inhale close to your total lung capacity.

That can lead to uncontrollable hyperventilation, which means you can't swim or put on a lifejacket or do anything but panic. If you're in heavy chop, it also means you've just inhaled a lung full of water.

That's what even mild cold water does in the first thirty seconds.

Next comes swimming failure. In study after study, even strong swimmers had trouble moving their limbs after more than 20 minutes of immersion in water at 53° Fahrenheit (12° C). They felt their arms and legs go numb, making it very hard to handle the straps and zippers of a PFD, or to get back into a boat.

Only then does hypothermia become the big danger.

And the fact is that, in the middle of July - on a day that was so hot you were sweating and thirsty from sunup to sundown, on a day that the water looked refreshing and indeed was refreshing for a 20 minute dip at noon, on a day when no one could have believed a person could die of cold - the cold is what probably killed Ron.