New Rule Has Jet Skiers Going in Circles

Personal watercraft--commonly called Jet Skis--will should have to travel counter-clockwise in two designated parts of Mission Bay, the City Council’s Public Facilities and Recreation Committee decided Wednesday.

The change had been recommended by George Loveland, park and recreation director.

But a spokesman for users of the small craft objected to the new rule, telling the committee that going in circles would prove so boring that people would wander into the general-use areas of the bay, creating worse dangers. The craft still are allowed in the general-use areas under the new rules, with no restrictions on their patterns of travel.

“Jet Skis were designed . . . to be operated, safely, by making many course changes. It’s very boring to ride a Jet Ski around in a big circle,” said William E. Jacobs, an attorney for the San Diego Personal Watercraft Assn. “If you impose that obligation on people in that personal watercraft area, a large proportion of those users are going to go around that area a couple of times and they are going to shoot right out on the bay.”

If they do that, Jacobs said, they will get into more severe accidents with boats.

(Personal watercraft is the generic name for the small, fast-moving vehicles marketed by Kawasaki as the Jet Ski and by Yamaha as the Wave Runner.)

Although the committee approved the new safety measure anyway, it also required the park director to report on the measure’s effects in the fall. Committee members Bob Filner, J. Bruce Henderson and Abbe Wolfsheimer voted for the measure; Judy McCarty and John Hartley voted against it.

The measure will become effective when the new rules are posted, said Chris Brewster, captain of the city’s lifeguards.

A 10-year-old boy died in September, 1988 while riding a Jet Ski, focusing public attention on the dangers of the watercraft. Thomas M. Ready broke his neck when he cut between a water skier and the tow-boat.

City lifeguards held public hearings that fall with groups such as boat clubs and boat rental businesses and devised measures to increase safety in the bay, which went into effect last summer. Among them: all boats within 100 feet of the shore must travel at 5 m.p.h. or less and only water-ski boats are permitted within 200 feet of water-ski loading and take-off areas. Additionally, boating rules were posted at all boat launch ramps, and a second area north of the entrance to Fiesta Island was designated for the exclusive use of personal watercraft.

Although the number of boating accidents remained about the same, serious-injury accidents--cases in which people went to the hospital--dropped from 25 in 1888 to 11 in 1989, Brewster said.

Brewster said after the meeting that 48 accidents were reported in Mission Bay in 1989. Of these, personal watercraft were involved in 19.