I’ve ridden a jet ski. They are great fun!
All anyone who wants to understand the reason for banning them in Kachemak Bay has to do is visit Nancy Lake or Big Lake on any summer weekend. Way back in the Dark Ages, there were always grebes nesting along the shore at my mother-in-law’s Nancy Lake cabin. Even their tiny chicks were very used to the canoe we used, and to the occasional water skier or fishing skiff in the middle of the lake. They nest no more. The large wakes of the whirling dervishes on jet skis drove them out.
Imagine, then, the impact on tiny shorebirds feeding on the mudflats of China Poot Bay or Mud Bay. Kiss the shorebird festival goodbye. Or consider the hundreds of murres peacefully preening in larges rafts offshore and near Gull Island. They already have huge survival stress due to warm blobs of water in their feeding areas.
Chris Manthos of the American Watercraft Association group wrote a carefully worded article trying to make jet skis look just like “any other kind of boat.” They are not. A snowmachine has a motor and carries passengers, but we don’t allow them on the highway. Snowmachine owners and I still have “equal access” to the road, we just have to be rational about it and follow the very reasonable rules of the road.
I was intending to send these comments to Rick Green and decided that would be a waste of time. He and the governor have an agenda and the comment process seems phony. It looks like the only way to change the direction this is headed is for those of us who care about the voiceless inhabitants of the bay is to squawk louder than a small but politically connected user group.
— Jim Thiele
Anchorage
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