Small boat gate at ramp
St Lucie county in Florida has a small boat ramp in George Lestrange preserve that has a unique gate. The gate is cut out like the shape of a small boat hull so that you can easily lift a canoe kayak or small jonboat over it to get to the ramp but there is no way you could get a larger boat and trailer down the ramp. they should be able to provide you pictures/resources about this gate.
I’ve read this whole thread…
– Last Updated: Oct-12-14 3:29 PM EST –
with much interest. Let me give you a slightly different take on it.
Here in the Ozarks, the larger streams are overrun by jet boats in the summer. And by larger streams, we're talking any stream that is flowing more than about 150 cubic feet per second. The mostly gravel riffles and narrow channels of these streams make jet boats more or less practical to use even at such low flows; a well set up jet boat can run full speed in about 4 inches of water.
And these jet boaters are NOT all anglers who run by you one time heading to their fishing spot. The jet boat anglers are outnumbered (vastly on weekends) by pleasure boaters who just want to go as fast as possible as far as possible, and many are drunk and have little or no regard for paddlers. We are talking about boats with engines up to 200 hp going as fast as 50 or more mph through pools no more than 100 feet wide and riffles no more than 4-6 inches deep and often as narrow as 20-30 feet. Basically, if you want to paddle these river sections on summer weekends you're going to have to head for the bank if you're in a riffle when you hear a boat coming, because they can't stop or slow down in shallow water and they often can't see far enough ahead in winding riffle areas to know you're there until too late. It's a never ending source of amazement to me that more paddlers haven't been killed by jet boat operators.
Now...up until about the mid-1980s, jet boat technology was rare enough and crude enough that you never saw one on an Ozark stream. By the 1990s they were pretty common, and they've grown in numbers ever since. In 1980, if you were building a boat ramp, it was for little aluminum fishing boats with probably no more than a 10 hp motor, and the operator was an angler who probably only ran a couple of pools upstream or downstream from the access to fish. Who would have imagined then that such a ramp would lead to access for literally hundreds of high speed boats?
My point is, there might not be much of a conflict now, but things change. All it takes is a few people deciding that a jet boat, or maybe some new emerging high speed technology, would be just the thing to use on your stream. Other speed freaks see them or read about them, and the technology suddenly explodes in popularity and you've got a situation similar to what we have in the Ozarks. A jet boat can run almost anywhere that's easy to paddle, only being unable to run areas with extremely shallow water and boulders big enough to knock holes in the boat. They can jump logs, so log-jammed sections don't give the daredevil operators an insurmountable problem. And the more difficult it is to run, the more likely that a significant percentage of those running it will be the doofuses that want to push the envelope, not the staid, sedate anglers.
Drop the boat ramp idea. Period. Your river will thank you for it, and it ain't worth the potential problems if you want to keep the place a haven for paddlers.
If you can’t rule them off altogether,
then their access to sections of river could be limited to certain times. There is no reason why canoeists and jet boaters should have to see one another, unless the canoeists offer their asterisk.
Good luck with that…
The moment you even mention limiting access to one group or another, and especially to jet boaters, they start screaming about their rights being violated, the politicians get involved, and everybody starts hating everybody else more than they did already.
In the interest of full disclosure, I own a jet boat. I almost never take it out of the shed from May to October, because I don’t want to have to worry about using it where I might run afoul of some non-motorized water user that can’t easily get out of my way (not to mention that I use mine strictly for fishing and the fishing sucks on the jet boatable streams in the summer). I use mine in the cold weather months to fish, when I can’t get a shuttle for a canoe trip because the canoe rentals are all closed.