I see your point about money mitigating certain risks, however, people engage in risky behavior all the time in order to gain some joy. Skiing, skydiving, and if you want to get closer to home, driving a car are all risky behaviors. The point of the story to me at least is that the fishermen made the very same value vs. risk judgments a businessman might make and decided that the risk of his lifestyle was worth the reward of being able to enjoy his family and friends fully right at that very moment, rather than in some distant hopeful future. Both are fully valid ways of looking at the world but the two men simply made different calls based on what was most important to them.