because the crowd has gotten right down to the edge, jesus needs some space. and by the way, water is a good conductor of sound and this is a fairly flat lake and a gentle surface of that lake would make a good point to sort of bounce the sound to that crowd of thousands that had gathered and it would give jesus a little bit of distance. so he asked him to put out a little way from the land, so peter gets in the boat, whoever else needed to help him handle this boat and push it back off the shore and stabilize in the water so that 