Boating safety doesn’t take a holiday
Two Texas boaters lost their lives over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and emergency responders survived a life-threatening situation when their vessel swamped and capsized in the same fierce current of the floodswelled river that claimed one of those victims.
Also during the holiday weekend, more than 20 boat-related incidents resulted in injuries to boaters, some significant that included broken bones and severe lacerations.
Most of Texas’s 540 game wardens, the primary law enforcement officers tasked with enforcing the state’s water safety laws and investigating boating-related accidents, patrolled Texas rivers, reservoirs and coastal waters over the weekend, contacting and conducting water safety checks on more than 11,000 vessels. Wardens issued almost 1,300 citations and slightly more than 1,300 warnings over the four-day period of May 24-27. They also arrested 39 individuals for boating while intoxicated.
“It was a very busy weekend for us, and, unfortunately, tragic with two boating fatalities and several open-water drownings,” said Cody Jones, assistant commander for marine enforcement for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “Memorial Day weekend is one of the biggest boating weekends of the year, so we focus a lot of our resources on water safety and will throughout the summer.”
Busy time of year
The late May holiday weekend marks the start of the heart of Texas recreational boating season, with the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day seeing the highest numbers of boats on the state’s public waters. An estimated 4 million people will participate in boating on Texas waters this year, with the majority focused during the coming three months.
Each Memorial Day weekend offers insights into how conditions for boating season are shaping up and what boating safety issues that boaters — and law enforcement — are most likely to face.
“What we saw this year is pretty consistent with what we saw last year and have been seeing,” Jones said. “Some of that’s positive. But there are some areas that are concerns.”
Overall, boating has become safer on Texas waters over the last couple of decades. Boating fatalities over recent years have been as much as half what they were just 20 ormore years ago, when Texas began a boater education course now required of anyone born on or after Sept.1, 1993, and operating a personal watercraft, powerboat with a 15-horsepower or larger motor and any wind-propelled vessel (sailboat) 14 feet in length or longer.
The improvement in boating safety has come as the number of boats in Texas has steadily climbed. The state currently has almost 580,000 registered powerboats and personal watercraft, tens of thousands of sailboats and an estimated 250,000 or more paddle craft.
Texas doesn’t know how many paddle craft are plying the state’s waterways; Texas, unlike many states, doesn’t require registration of humanpropelled boats such as canoes, kayaks and paddleboards. It also does not require paddlers to have any boating safety training, although a free paddle craft safety training course is available on the TPWD’s website.
With the explosion of the number of paddle craft in the state over the last several years, both on inland and especially coastal waters, has come an increase in those craft being involved in boating accidents and fatalities.
This Memorial Day weekend tragically illustrated this trend. Both fatal boating-related incidents involved paddle craft.
The first fatal incident could have claimed multiple victims. On May 26, three people launched paddle craft onto the flood-swollen Brazos River just downstream from
Lake Granbury. The paddle craft capsized in the dangerous rough and swift water. Two of the people were rescued, but the third, a 61-year-old woman, was swept away by the current. Despite her wearing a personal flotation device, the strong current carried and pinned the woman beneath the water, where she drowned, the Hood County Sheriff ’s Office reported.
The local fire department launched one of its powerboats to attempt a rescue or recovery of the woman, but the extremely rough water and fierce current in the river swamped and capsized the vessel, forcing a dangerous rescue of the prospective rescuers.
Conditions in the river were so dangerous that officials effected an emergency closure of the gates of the dam on Lake Granbury to allow water levels and current to drop enough so that recovery of the body could be made more safely.
The second fatality occurred early Memorial Day between Aransas Pass and Port Aransas. The body of a 31-year-old man was found along Harbor Island near the Aransas Channel just after sunrise, and his kayak was found about a quarter-mile away. The man’s kayak had been severely damaged, apparently from being struck by another larger vessel, the Aransas Pass Police Department reported.
Aransas Pass police and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department jointly investigated the incident, with game wardens from TPWD’s boat accident investigation team working to reconstruct the incident.
Late Friday afternoon, Aransas Pass Police issued a statement indicating that they believe the victim died from the impact of being hit by another boat. They also announced they believe they have located the boat and the boat operator involved in the collision.
Evidence indicates the collision occurred almost an hour before sunrise, the police reported, and it was noted that the victim was not wearing a life jacket and did not appear to have required lighting on him or the kayak at the time of the collision. (All boats, including paddle craft, are required to have at least one bright light visible from all directions operating when on the water between sunset and sunrise.)
“All evidence at this time points to this event being a tragic accident,” the Aransas Pass police said in a news release but noted that the investigation of the incident is ongoing.
Paddle craft vulnerable
Several other paddle craft were involved in boating-related incidents over the Memorial Day weekend. In one case, TPWD wardens assisted a couple after a woman, who was not wearing a life jacket, fell from her kayak that the wind quickly carried away, leaving her to cling to her husband’s kayak. Wardens pulled the woman into their patrol boat and took her to shore.
In at least two other instances along the coast, paddlers had to be rescued after high winds and rough water conditions stranded them.
The high and growing number of incidents that wardens see involving canoes and especially kayaks is a concern, Jones said, noting that some people who use the vessels have little or no experience or training operating them and often are not aware of water safety regulations governing their use.
Conversely, the number of boating-related accidents, injuries and fatalities involving persons watercraft has steadily declined over the last couple of decades and especially over the past 10 years or so. As recently as the early 2000s, personal watercraft, usually shortened to PWC, accounted for a disproportional number of boating-related injuries and fatalities.
But tighter regulations governing the operation of PWCs, changes in their designs and education of users has resulted in a significant improvement in their safety. Texas water safety laws require any person on a PWC to wear a life jacket at all times and have the vessel’s emergency engine cutoff switch attached to stop the craft should the operator be thrown from it. Also, regulations prohibit operating a PWC at night or at any speed faster than headway speed within 50 feet of another PWC, motorboat, vessel, platform, person, object or shore. The result has been a dramatic decrease in accidents and injuries involving PWCs.
But PWCs continue to show up in boating accident statistics, and this Memorial Day weekend saw the small, fast vessels involved in some of the 21 accidents TPWD game wardens investigated. One of them, on the Neches River, resulted in an operator suffering a broken shoulder and lacerations, Jones said.
Overall, the 21 boating related accidents that TPWD wardens investigated over the Memorial Day weekend were three more than the previous year.
“We were glad to see that there weren’t many major accidents,” Jones said.
BWI arrests down
Another bright spot was a drop in the number of arrests that wardens made for boating while intoxicated. The 39 arrests Texas game wardens made for boating while intoxicated were a significant drop from the 55 BWI arrests over the 2018 Memorial Day weekend.
Boaters may be getting the message that drinking alcohol while operating a boat is dangerous behavior. Arrests for BWI have significantly declined over the last several years. The 2014-18 average is about 150 BWI arrests annually, which is a significant drop from the 2000-2010 average of almost 250.
“Anecdotally, wardens reported the number of boats with a ‘designated operator,’ is up, so that’s a definite positive, “Jones said.
But the two boatingrelated fatalities over this Memorial Day weekend doubled the single fatality over the same holiday weekend a year ago, but the slight uptick in accidents and the persistence of some basic boating safety rules violations such as not having enough life jackets for each person on a vessel is evidence that there are improvements still to be made. shannon.tompkins@chron.com twitter.com/chronoutdoors