Waves of Sound and Fury : Neighbors of New Jet-Ski Ramp Fear a Long, Noisy Summer

Dr. Steven Schiff is standing on the Granada Avenue boat ramp in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, staring out to sea. He’s looking for the enemy.

“There he is,” Schiff says, pointing at a young man astride a Yamaha VXR, a vessel known as a personal watercraft or, more commonly, a jet ski.

The young man, who calls himself “Tuk,” is zipping along at 30 or 35 m.p.h., his tremendous mane of blond hair streaming behind him, his watercraft skimming over the tops of the small waves.

Tuk obviously is enjoying himself. Schiff just as obviously is not.

“There, can you hear that?” Schiff asks. The 650-cc engine that powers Tuk’s craft emits a low drone, and the hull slaps the water after every bounce.

The sound is not loud, Schiff concedes, although the pitch is somewhere in the irritation range of many human ears, particularly older ones. Schiff’s young son, sleeping in a stroller nearby, doesn’t seem to notice.

But it is a cool, overcast day, and Tuk is the only watercrafter out on the slate-gray sea between the beach and the breakwater. When the weather warms up and the jet-ski crowd realizes that there’s a new, legal launching site at the Granada ramp, Schiff and other Long Beach residents fear that the sound of Tuk’s vessel will be magnified by the score, perhaps by the hundreds. They fear their once-quiet beach will be invaded by an armada of jet skiers.

They are not at all happy at the prospect.

“I would never suggest that anybody doesn’t have the right to be on the water,” says Schiff, 41, a soft-spoken cardiologist who lives in Belmont Heights. “My concern is this beach. (Jet skiers) have come to my bastion of quiet and peacefulness, and I frankly don’t want that.”

Tuk, for his part, seems at first mystified and then angry that anyone would object to his presence on the beach or on the waves. Standing at the water’s edge with his companions, a long-haired young man named Rick and a heavily tattooed individual who says his name is “Dog,” the 28-year-old Tuk summed up his feelings toward the anti-jet skiers with an obscenity.

“---- them,” he said, employing a vulgarity that he and his friends use, with great frequency, as an all-purpose verb, adjective and adverb. “I don’t have an attitude toward them; why should they have an attitude toward me?”

“Yeah,” Dog interjects. “The (expletive) ocean is big. It’s big enough for (expletive) everybody.”

Of course, personal watercraft enthusiasts will say it’s unfair to even imply that Tuk and Dog, with their rough talk, represent the personal watercraft crowd. And perhaps it is unfair.

Still, it’s clear that a line has been drawn in the sand at the Granada Avenue Personal Watercraft Launching Facility.

Personal watercraft range from small, one-person craft that are ridden standing up to 400-pound craft that can carry two or three people at a time, at speeds up to 45 m.p.h. The average price of a personal watercraft is about $4,500. Although “jet ski” is often used to describe all personal watercraft, “Jet Ski” is actually a trademark of the Kawasaki Corp.

Traditionally, personal watercraft have been launched like any powerboat, which in Long Beach meant that they went into the water at Marine Stadium or at a ramp near the 2nd Street bridge.

This caused problems for both boaters and personal watercrafters, however. Boaters complained that personal watercraft were too loud, that there were too many of them and that their operators too often didn’t follow boating rules. Personal watercrafters complained that the launch sites were too far from the ocean, especially since there is a 5-m.p.h. speed limit in the marina and channel.

In 1990, a five-member Personal Watercraft Advisory Committee was appointed to study the creation of a new launch area exclusively for personal watercraft. Eventually, the committee designated the Granada Avenue boat ramp, which was previously used by sailboats, as a personal-watercraft launch site for one year. After Dec. 31, the committee will decide whether to make the personal-watercraft launch site permanent.

Some area residents, and at least one committee member, were horrified by the decision. They charge that the committee simply shunted the marina’s problem off onto their beach.

“I would put (personal watercraft) in the category of lawn blowers,” says Janet Davids, a committee member who opposed the Granada Avenue launch site. “I would be happy if there weren’t any of them, anywhere, ever. . . . We already have so few places to quietly enjoy the beaches.”

“We hope to close that ramp,” says Aldo Zanier, president of the Belmont Shore Improvement Assn., a residents’ group. Like other opponents, Zanier recites a litany of problems caused by personal watercraft: noise, danger to swimmers and sailing craft, and fuel pollution in the water and on the beach.

“They are the Hell’s Angels of the sea!” Zanier says heatedly.

Zanier’s comment illustrates another factor that colors almost every discussion of personal watercraft. Although rules for the Granada ramp have been set up to, at least theoretically, address many of the problems cited by opponents--speed limits, fuel spillage, noise--there is the perception that personal-watercraft riders have a serious image problem. They are widely seen as the bad boys of the water, reckless and irresponsible hot dogs who go too fast, jump other boats’ wakes and generally behave in a loud, obnoxious manner.

Even personal-watercraft enthusiasts acknowledge the image problem.

“Until the last three or four years, personal watercraft were marketed toward the young, wild, rowdy crowd,” says Dave Kelley, an editor at Personal Watercraft Illustrated, a Long Beach-based magazine for personal-watercraft riders. “They were motorcycle riders who wanted to do the same thing on the water.

“And with the older models (of personal watercraft),” Kelley adds, “the exhaust came out above the water, so they were loud as hell.”

But Kelley insists that the old image is outdated.

First, he says, “all the new watercraft now have exhausts under water, so they’re much, much quieter.” As for personal-watercraft riders, he says, “with the two- or three-person sit-down models, the marketing is being directed at family people, and the sit-downs are outselling the stand-ups by 2 to 1.”

He adds that personal-watercraft riders are getting older. “Our average reader, for example, is 31 years old.”

Still, Kelley says, “the bad apples, the 10%, can really ruin it for everybody.”

“Sure, some personal-watercraft people cause problems,” says Bruce Stjernstrom, vice president of the Santa Ana-based International Jet Sport Boating Assn., which helped draft regulations for the Granada Avenue launching site. “But it’s blown out of proportion. . . . We’ve tried to promote responsible use of personal watercraft, and we think the situation has greatly improved.

“We’re not bad people,” Stjernstrom adds.

Stjernstrom, Kelley and others say there also is an element of elitism in the prejudice against personal watercraft. Why should people who live in expensive beachside homes, or ride around in $50,000 boats, have exclusive use of the beach and the sea? Why should they have more rights than someone who can afford only $5,000 or so for a personal watercraft? After all, they say, a personal watercraft is really nothing more than a poor man’s boat.

Those arguments do not sway Belmont Shore area residents who are looking toward summer with apprehension. Some say they intend to take sound and video recording equipment to the Granada ramp to document the problems they are sure the personal watercrafters will cause. Others hint darkly that they have city officials’ home phone numbers, and that if their peace is disturbed, the officials’ will be too.