Weird how little things stir up memories.
When I was a kid, 10-11 years old, I spent a couple summers working on my grampa's charter boat (I was "assistant deck hand", mostly I was there to do the jobs my brother didn't want to). We never wore life jackets. We had them for the passengers if they wanted them, but we never wore them. Not even me, who was a child who never bothered to learn to swim. None of the boat crews did, and they weren't required to by law unless we were in a situation that the skipper determined was hazardous.
A fair number of years after my short time down there, one of the local boats (whose deckhand was supposed to be a cousin of mine until he swapped at the last minute) got caught in a bad sea and went over. Of the nineteen people on her, the deckhand and seven passengers survived. Of the survivors, six of them had managed to get on the life jackets stored in the cabin. Of the ones who didn't make it, only one had a life jacket.
So yeah.