Alan,

have you ever asked someone to blow in your face to detect alcohol on their breath?

Howard19 says they asked him to do this at a safety check near the needles bridge 

personally, i think it was a volunteer/rookie and the guys on the force were messing with him and he was gullible enough to actually asked him to do it. 

I've never asked anyone to do it. If you ask me, it's a lazy (and inefficient) way to check to see if someone's drunk. The best way to investigate an OUI is to do it BY THE BOOK, and how we are trained. It's the most fair for the boater who may be drinking and NOT impaired and the best way to have your arrest, evidence and observations hold up in court.

It's 115 degrees out, for Christ's sake. Anyone who'd been drinking would have smelled like booze from the sweat alone. I stopped a guy once (only one in the boat) and smelled the booze from 10 feet away.

And with H1N1 and all other sort of nasty chit around, the fewer people breathing on me, the better. (I'm not OCD or germophobe or anything, but that's just NASTY!)

Just a couple of notes.

First, I'm with the La Paz County Sheriff's Office, not Parker PD. But I forgive you, Brad.  

An on-water DUI (OUI) conviction in AZ DOES NOT go on your driving record or affect your license in AZ. However, California gets reports of ALL states' OUIs and will apply it to your CA driving record to enhance future DUI/OUIs as a prior offense, or use it to suspend your license if you already have prior OUI/DUI offenses. But one, by itself, won't affect your CA record.

The formula for safe loading (number of passengers) for boats without a capacity plate is: length X width / 15. The resulting number is rounded DOWN to a whole number. For example a 21' boat that is 6 1/2 feet wide at it's widest point would be: 21 X 6.5= 136.5. 136.5 / 15=
9.1. Round down and the safe number of passengers would be 9. (That includes the driver)

I'm not sure I'd want to put 9 people on my 21' (20' 10") Spectra, but that's what the formula comes out to.

EDIT: No requirement for boater education in AZ YET. But it will probably be coming soon. Only about 6 states don't have some form of mandatory education. Both AZ and CA are 2 of them. Take a class NOW, before the laws are enacted and open seats become hard to find.