The boating surveys are all wrong.  The most popular destination by boat is not the Florida Keys or Chesapeake Bay or the Bahamas.  Nope.  It’s La-La-Land.  This became crystal clear during a boat ride on Grand Traverse Bay in Northern Michigan two summers back when my sister predicted that her daughter and mine would be asleep within 90 minutes.  I took the bet.  The girls were so wound up you’d have thought someone had clipped battery chargers to their ears.  An hour later they were both lying in puddles of drool.

Most boaters would agree that a boat is basically a hammock with a motor or sail.  The National Marine Manufacturers Association recently asked 500 consumers their primary reasons for owning a boat.  Car Blackwell, vice president of marketing and communications for the NMMA, opened the file and started reading the answers: “For pure relaxation…serenity…relaxing from stress…for peace.” He stopped.  “They’re all the same, just different words.”

But is this relax thing just a vibe, like the one copped from watching a fish swim in a tank?  Or is there something more physical to it, like having the fish watch you swim?

“The last time I was on a boat,” said Blackwell, “it was as if the stress were literally coming out of my neck and shoulders.”

The most common explanation is that the sun and glare from the water turn people to toast.  But we’re talking jelly here.  The muscles loosen.  The furrowed foreskins slacken.  The tension droops.

It’s no fantasy.  Back in 1990 researchers at Stanford University found that when preterm infants lay on waterbeds the show “marked reductions” in restlessness and irritability.  A few years later another doctor found that wave motion unlocked throat muscles that caused certain people to stutter.

“It’s the same reason you sit in a rocking chair on the porch,” said Carline Lutynski of Norwich, Connecticut. “The premise is that the motion triggers cell memory back to when we were in the womb–a time of total peace.”

Debate the theory all you want.  Lutynski, 63, is so convinced that last fall she started using a 35-foot sloop to investigate how it might reduce stress and strengthen the immune system for women with breast cancer.  She’s a breast cancer survivor herself.

“When I was going through it, I thought back to when I was c civil engineering tech, ad I would leave work early on Fridays to stretch out on my little boat,” she says. “I wanted to bring back that feeling for breast cancer patients.  Being in the boat doesn’t require anything physical like yoga or a thought process like meditation.  You just get in.”

It will take years to determine if turning a person to pudding in a boat can actually help fight cancer, but some doctors are already on board.

“I think there’s validity to it,” said cancer researcher Dr. Scott Kurtzman, professor of surgery at the University of Connecticut and director of surgery at Waterbury Hospital. “I’m not sure yet if there will be a survival benefit, but by inducing an overall state of relaxation, you might improve the immune system, and at worst you’d give cancer patients those periods of relaxation.”

The first woman who showed up for the study was in her 30s, a stage-three breast cancer patient.  Though weak from fighting the disease, she was anything but relaxed.  Boats were new to her.  She went out for one hour.

“When she came back I didn’t even recognize here,” said Lutynski. “Her face was so relaxed that it looked like a light had come back into her.  It had replaced all the stress. I really think it bordered on miraculous.”

The proof was in the pudding.  So, where are you taking the boat this weekend?