[pbb]

I agree you have a limited number of occurrences. Most likely it is the full universe of occurrences (at least for recent years). And this is different from the sample size. I'm working on a study of occupational injuries where about 13000 people were screened for (asked about) occupational injuries and less than 200 such injuries were identified. You sample size in that case is the 13000.

Here again, we really don't know how many hours people are spending on the ocean, so we have neither a sample nor a denominator for a rate of attacks.

But given that you have a similar number of occurrences, you would have to believe that the hours spent at risk (i.e., on the ocean) by the two groups was very different to conclude that you might have a higher risk for one group.

My sense (and here we depart from anything statistical or scientific) is that there aren't orders of magnitude lower person hours spent in Hobie Mirage kayaks on the open ocean compared to paddle kayaks, hence I don't see anything in the data that I would find to be convincing that there is a difference.

It wouldn't be scientific, but you could try to get a sense by creating a "poll" on various California kayak fishing forums about how many hours users fish or kayak in the ocean during an average month in mirage drive or paddle kayaks. That might give some more information, but it wouldn't be conclusive since it would be a convenience sample rather than a probability sample of kayak anglers. But I can't think of any feasible way of doing the latter, except possibly asking DFG to add that to their CRFS survey when they survey kayakers. (I guess you could ask DFG to let you do a mail or email survey to everyone with a fishing license and and ocean stamp, if you had a lot of money to burn).