Boats.

The boat and boater will be considered a single entity in this study, and the terms will be used interchangeably. The boater makes the decisions about when to leave, where to go, etc., but the boat makes the actual trip, and the boater's decisions are subject to the physical limitations of the boat. If there are more than one person in the boat, decisions could possibly be made as aggregate decisions. This is not considered explicitly in this study. Implicitly, if there are more than one boater per boat, they could be considered an ``aggregate'' boater. Their corporate decision to the boat's activities would still follow the same rules as if there were only one person in the boat.

Certain properties of the boat control its ability to navigate the environment. Of these, the most important is the draft of the boat. Sarasota Bay is shallow, with more than 30% of its area in three feet or less of water at mean lower low water (MLLW). Many areas of the bay are inaccessible to deeper draft boats, and many boats are only able to access open water from their docks at medium or high tides (Antonini and Box, 1996).