My family and I have a tradition of heading up to Illinois Beach State park as many weekends in the summer as we can. We love walking up and down the beautiful beach front and playing/swimming in the (often frigid) Lake Michigan waters. Last summer my dad bought a little blow up raft for us to use in the water. He ordered it online, it came in a box. We have used it only a few times, but haven’t had any incidents. We are for the most part good swimmers and always keep the boats inflatable seats ready to throw to anyone if they jump out too far/fall into the water.

The last time we went to the beach was father’s day and because of the day it was very crowded. It was also the first time that we have ever seen a park ranger out on the beach. He was driving around making sure that everyone was having safe fun and abiding to the parks rules. Or so he said. Because he played fetch with the German Shepard on the beach in front of the “No Dogs ALLOWED sign”. My dad and youngest siblings were out on the water in our little raft when the park ranger came by and asked us if we were with them, we said that we were. He then asked if there were life jackets on the “boat”, to which we replied no there weren’t but there were detachable inflated seats. He then motioned for them to come back to shore saying they needed life jackets.

Once they got back to shore the ranger/officer informed us that our “boat” had to be registered with the state of Illinois and that there needed to be a life jacket per person on the “boat”. Just to clarify that means that you do not have to wear the life jacket while on a boat if you are over the age of 13, there just has to be a jacket in the boat. Because apparently if you go overboard the life jacket in the boat will keep you from drowning in the water…off of the boat… And apparently not having the life jackets in your “boat” while you’re drowning results in a ticket and a $120 fine.

Now I understand that there is a safety concern on boats and that the appropriate apparel should be worn. However we do not have a boat. We have a blow up raft. Similar to those used to save drowning victims. It came in a box. It is stored in a bag. It would fit in a pool.

It looks like this:

When we asked the officer why we needed to have life jackets on our raft and the people on floatation devices did not he said that those toys couldn’t go out as far as we could on our “boat”. Which was just not true. We watched as those people went farther out into the lake on their toys than we had in our “boat”.

So we packed up the raft for the day, but kept out the seats. And instead of going out on the water in our little raft, we used the inflatable seats. My siblings wound up farther into the water on the inflatables than we had in the “boat”. So even though they were clinging to nothing more than an inflatable seat about the size of a standard pillow and had gotten at least a quarter of a mile off shore they wouldn’t get into trouble for not wearing life vests because they were not in a boat.