Boaters can cut risks with simple actions
Recent boating-related incidents, including two fatalities, several emergencies and a few emergencies that turned out to not be emergencies underscore two growing areas of concern for Texas boating safety officials and the state and federal first-responders who deal with the consequences. Chief among the two are incidents involving paddlecraft, almost exclusively kayaks. Those increasingly popular human-powered vessels are accounting for an outsized and growing percentage of boating related fatalities in Texas. They also are involved in a burgeoning number of incidents in which empty, adrift or aground kayaks that carry no identification of owners trigger extensive, expensive and sometimes dangerous searchand-rescue operations that almost always prove to be false alarms.
The other centers around a series of drownings and near drownings of boaters, mostly wadefishers on coastal bays, who attempt to swim after vessels that go adrift when the relatively new technology of mechanical shallowwater anchors fails to keep the boat in place.
“They certainly are issues we and our partners in the (U.S.) Coast Guard and local law enforcement increasingly see,” assistant commander Cody Jones, boating law administrator for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s law enforcement division, said. “But there are steps boaters can take to greatly reduce any risks.”
Life jacket a no-brainer
Over the recent Labor Day holiday weekend, TPWD game wardens working water safety and law enforcement patrols on the state’s public waters had a typically busy session. They contacted about 1,400 vessels, issued 1,300 citations and 700 warnings, and made 20 arrests, Jones said.
They also investigated eight boat-related accidents. One of them involved a fatality. And as has increasingly been the case in Texas, that fatality involved a person in a paddlecraft. On Labor Day, TPWD game wardens recovered the body of a 42-year-old San Antonio man from Boerne City Lake. Law enforcement search and rescue staff the evening before had discovered some of his belongings and his empty kayak floating in the small public reservoir.
The drowned man was not wearing a life jacket. And that is invariably the case with those who drown in boating accidents, Jones said.
As paddlecraft — kayaks, particularly — have grown in popularity in Texas, they have become more commonly involved in boating related fatalities. Last year, slightly less than half (43 percent) of the 45 boating related fatalities in Texas involved paddlecraft. Almost all were drownings — results of the boats swamping, tipping over or otherwise throwing their occupants, many of whom have limited experience in the small, “tippy” craft, into the water.
“The simplest, most effective safety measure a boater in a kayak or any boat can take is to wear a PFD (personal flotation device; life jacket),” Jones said. “It’s especially important in kayaks, where it’s not a question of if you’ll end up in the water but when.”
The proclivity of boaters in paddlecraft to end up in the water has led to other water safety-related issues, especially along the Texas coast, where kayaks are a very popular way for anglers and paddlers out just for pleasure to access isolated back-bay areas as well as the open waters of the bays. Those boaters sometime get into emergency situations. Their craft capsizes and floats away before they can retrieve it, leaving them stranded, sometimes close enough to reach land, sometimes not.
Along the coast, Texas game wardens and the U.S. Coast Guard regularly scramble for emergency search-and-rescue operations involving stranded, missing or overdue paddlers.
“It’s something that’s very common for our wardens to deal with,” Jones said.
In many of those cases, the stranded boaters themselves use their mobile phone to call for help. In others, friends or family report overdue paddlers. But a large number of the dozens of search-andrescue operations annually launched by state wardens and/or the U.S. Coast Guard are triggered by someone seeing an empty kayak floating in the bay or washed up on a shoreline and reporting the finding as a possible emergency situation; that empty boat could mean the boat’s user is in the water or stranded somewhere on a shoreline.
Game wardens and the Coast Guard treat those adrift/aground kayaks as the emergencies they might well be, scrambling to launch search-and-rescue operations that can involve both boats and aircraft.
“We look at it as a rescue or recovery situation until shown otherwise,” Jones said. And it can be tough to prove otherwise.
Frustratingly, an adrift/ aground kayak seldom if ever yields any useful information for would-be rescuers. Unlike with powerboats, paddlecraft in Texas are not required to be registered with the state and marked with identifying numbers — the socalled “TX” numbers required to be placed on the sides of registered powerboats. Those registration numbers allow game wardens to make a quick identification of any adrift or aground powerboat and gives them a person to contact about the possible circumstances surrounding the vessel.
Texas has no record of who owns paddlecraft or even how many are in the state. Low-end estimates are around 300,000, and there could easily be a half-million in the state.
Without knowing who owns the empty kayak found floating or aground, emergency responders must assume someone fell out of it and is is need of help. Those search-andrescue operations are intense and expensive. Cost of scrambling a couple of U.S, Coast Guard searchand-rescue vessels and a helicopter — the aircraft often is necessary because powerboats can’t access some of the shallow, backbay areas kayakers often ply — can easily exceed $25,000 an hour.
“There are lots of assets put into those searches,” Jones said.
Information, please
The majority of the search-and-rescue operations involving empty kayaks found adrift or aground end with no rescue or tragedy. The empty kayaks most often are found to be craft that simply drifted away from waterfront properties, blown into the water by a gust of wind or slipped its mooring or left along the shore where a rising tide floated it and allowed it to be carried away.
“If we could identify the owner of those boats, it would make our jobs a lot easier,” Jones said. “We could make a phone call and know if there’s an emergency situation or if the boat just got loose from behind someone’s vacation home.”
And that’s where kayak owners can help, Jones said.
“The easy solution is for owners to put their name and phone number in the vessel,” Jones said. “If we had some contact information, that would be a tremendous help.”
Writing contact information in permanent waterproof marker on a waterproof material and attaching it to the kayak is a simple thing. The U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary offers “Paddle Smart” identification stickers designed for just that purpose, Jones aid. The waterproof orange sticker has space for the owner’s name and two phone numbers to be contacted if the boat is found. Kayak owners can contact their local Coast Guard Auxiliary and request the “Paddle Smart” identification stickers. Some kayak dealers offer the stickers to their customers.
Coastal boaters who use their craft to access wadefishing areas also have a simple solution that will avoid what appears to be an increasingly common, dangerous and even deadly situation involving their vessels going adrift: Don’t depend on mechanical shallow-water anchoring devices to hold a boat in place while wadefishing.
Last month, a wadefisher drowned near Port O’Connor while trying to swim to his vessel after the boat’s mechanical shallowwater anchor failed to hold and the boat drifted away.
Use of these shallowwater anchors, mounted to the transom of boats and employing an articulating metal arm that lowers a spike into the bottom and hold the vessel in place, has become common over the past decade. They offer convenient and easy use, deploying and retracting at the touch of a button.
But the devices are not designed for use as a primary anchor and should never be left unattended when only the shallowwater anchor is deployed — points the manufacturers clearly note in their owner/ user manuals.
Anchors an issue
Still, some wadefishers use the shallow-water anchors as the only anchor for their boats, forgoing the deployment of a conventional anchor before bailing over the side and wading away from the boat. This can lead to grief. A rising tide, strong current, wind, waves and other factors can cause the shallow-water anchor to lose its purchase, allowing the boat to drift free.
Once adrift in even a slight wind, a boat can easily move much faster than most people can swim, and trying to catch the loose vessel can get a person into serious trouble very quickly.
“You are really taking a dangerous risk trying to swim to catch that boat,” Jones said.
In addition to the recent fatal incident, two other drownings of persons trying to swim to catch a boat after the shallowwater anchor failed to hold it in place have occurred over the last two years, Jones said. All have occurred on the mid-coast.
Anecdotally, there have been several close calls involving wadefishers trying to swim to catch boats gone adrift when a shallow-water anchor was the only anchoring device used.
“Those shallow-water anchors are designed to stop and temporarily hold a boat, not to hold it for long periods in the conditions you see in the bays,” Jones said. Deploying a conventional anchor takes more time and effort than simply pushing a button for the shallow-water anchor. But it s the only way to safely and securely hold the boat in place for an extended time.