Police Yourself or Be Policed, Editorial, Todays News Herard

[Havasuing]

Lake Havasu is filled with big boats and small boats and fast boats and slow boats. Can’t everyone just get along?

Hooray for the Lake Havasu Marine Association for proactively seeking boater engagement as a way to reduce accidents and injuries and deaths. The Association, pointing to a recent spate of accidents, is pushing boaters to assume responsibilities for actions that could lead to accidents.

Specifically, the Association is drawing attention to unsafe overtaking of slower boats, intoxication, using flotation devices and using safety lanyards for auto-shutoff.

The safety calls may not seem like much, or at least not like much new, but the association’s driving mantra is that Lake Havasu offers “freedom to boat.”

If dancing that fine line is not enough, the Association is also engaging the plethora of agencies with enforcement powers on the lake to assure everyone’s working from the same base data on safety and accidents. Asking boaters to be more responsible may not achieve the desired results. Likewise, involving government could have unintended consequences.

But the alternative to the Association’s message is clear: More rules and more laws and a lot less freedom to boat.
It doesn’t use these words, but the Association’s recent position statement may as well have said: Police yourself or be policed.

Lake Havasu is a big draw for performance boats seeking a lake big enough to play and without absolute speed limits. These bigger boats going at high speed produce large wakes. Big, fast boats and their wakes are some of the key concerns from the Association.
Lake Havasu doesn’t need speed limits beyond those already in place for no-wake zones. State law already requires that boats be operated at speeds appropriate for conditions. The law has enough teeth already to cite a boat going excessively fast in traffic or in the narrow confines of a river canyon.

The Marine Association is seeking education. We applaud that. Slow learners need tickets and fines to keep them from becoming the reason boating freedom is a thing of the past on Lake Havasu.

[HB Vic]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying except the big boat/big wake part. The larger and faster a boat is (cats especially) the smaller the wake because there is much less boat in the water. If they were knocking over 2' wakes they could not physically achieve such high speeds. But this not only applies to big cats, it also applies to the smaller ones too.

If we're gonna talk about big wakes, then clearly we need to talk about the water bagged huge ski/wakeboard boats.

If we're concerned about high speeds lets talk high speeds. If we're concerned about huge wakes, we clearly need to talk about the big water baggin ski boats.

If we're talking safety. The two should never meet. Nothing like launching off a wakeboard boats 2-3' roller on a calm windless day.

It's happened to me and it will scare the poop out of you. And if you're in a cat you do not need to be going fast to see nothing but blue sky after launching off one of those rollers. I'm pretty sure I soiled myself after it happened to me a couple years ago.

And the wakeboard boats are only getting bigger so they can carry more water so they can make bigger tidal waves.

And I haven't even touched on the physical damage to the shoreline these rollers cause.

Seems to me creating a quagga storage facility on any boat should be against the law


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[spike morelli]

If I remember correctly, Maritime/ Coast Guard law states that your are responsible for any damage caused by your boat's wake, regardless of how big or small your boat is, or what it is, you should be responsible. Speed.....who doesn't enjoy zipping over the water at speed...it's been done since forever, but I don't remember hearing about so many speed related incidents as I hear today.
At the risk of sounding like some old curmudgeon, I think that there's a percentage of boaters who lack the common sense that was once common. I think the "Police yourself, or BE policed" statement is truly the bottom line here. I fear that people will ruin boating freedoms for other people, and that more laws and restrictions are around the corner due to the" squirrel-nut zipper" boat owners in our midst.