By Bert Atwood
Regarding a nighttime speed limit on Clear Lake, when I was in my teens and about to get a driver”s license, my mother told me she would like to wrap me in cotton and put me in a safe deposit box. But she wisely added that she couldn”t do that and take away life”s experiences.
Every day people die in auto accidents, airplane accidents, boat accidents and freak accidents such as on a roller coaster ? or even a space shuttle. Are we to ban all these activities? To do so would take away the spice of life.
Over the past 63 years of boating on Clear Lake, I have sometimes been in choppy water, heavy swells, and/or fog which made traveling more than 5 or 10 mph impossible ? even in the daytime.
I”ve also been out on beautiful moonlit nights when speeds of 50 mph or more were safe. Clear Lake is not Lake Shasta. I have safely navigated (at speeds in the 45 mph range) from Lakeport to Konocti Bay on moonless nights using the lights on shore for reference and knowing where peninsulas, islands and buoys are and by sitting high in the boat so I could see other boats or obstructions.
And I, like B. Hollenbeck wrote on Aug. 8, have spent hours on the lake at night enjoying the meteors. I have kept my eyes and ears open and I carry a large searchlight capable of giving approaching boats plenty of warning in addition to my navigation lights.
Yes, laws were broken and common sense did not prevail the night of the notorious accident three years ago. Would a 15 mph speed limit have prevented that? As an insurance investigator, I learned that most accidents are the result of four, five, or six things going wrong at the same time. In this case we had an inexperienced person at the helm, an intoxicated skipper, a light possibly either broken or not switched on, an inattentive driver of the second boat and no moon. Speed was only a factor, because all the other items came first.
I agree that education and common sense are needed. But America is supposedly the land of the free ? let”s not mess it up with absolute restrictions.
Also, what has happened to the beacon on Mount Konocti that used to tell water skiers it”s time to stop for the day? If the county can”t maintain the beacon, how can they enforce a nighttime speed limit?
Bert Atwood
Kelseyville
