By Neil Farrell
Volunteers with Celebrate Los Osos are once again surveying the boats left at the Cuesta Inlet and plan to haul off any that are not licensed or otherwise in compliance with the rules governing storage of boats in that tidal mudflat.
Some 16 volunteers fanned out Jan. 17 to check for current licenses on the 192 kayaks, canoes catamarans and more ringing the inlet, said Pandora Nash-Karner who has spearheaded the clean up efforts of the Inlet for Celebrate L.O. Of the boats, 62 are out of compliance, she said, some 32% of the total.
The Cuesta Inlet is private property and Celebrate Los Osos struck a deal with the property owners, who have traditionally been lenient with letting people use their property, to allow boats to stay but not until they’ve been properly licensed and the owners identified. The various boats are a mish-mash of IDs.
“Some of the boats have current licenses but no contact information,” said Nash-Karner. “Some of the boats have contact info and no licenses. Some of the owners disregard the notices and put their contact information on the boat with ‘permanent marker,’ which is not permanent and fades quickly into un-readability. Each of our flyers, posted on the boats, recommends outdoor vinyl stick-on letters or a vinyl sticker made at Goofy Graphics in Morro Bay.”
Like a bad penny some of the boats keep turning up. “At least two of the current out-of-compliance multihulls were removed during our last major cleanup in 2011 due to lack of licenses,” she explained. “They have been mysteriously returned to the inlet, still without licenses.”
“It was shocking to find after only 2 years,” Mimi Kalland, vice-president of Celebrate Los Osos said, “after our huge outreach efforts and cleanup that there are this many boats totally out of compliance, as though we never went through the earlier effort. It’s difficult to believe so many people take the use of this property for granted and don’t see it as a wonderful privilege that could be revoked at any time, should the owner chose to do so. We plan to post permanent signs on the property in April and we hope that will make a difference.”
Given the condition of some of these boats, one could see the Inlet as a boat junkyard. “One Lido 14 [small sailboat] has been laying unused for years. Just before the last cleanup the owner placed a current registration on the boat. It hasn’t been touched since and is now covered with lichen and out of date.”
They tagged some 62 vessels with notices to come into compliance or they will be hauled away. But that hasn’t done much good in the past. “The boats were tagged in April and again in September,” said Nash-Karner. “Many of those tags still remain on the boats, proving the owners don’t use them frequently.”
The new warnings have a deadline of April to get with the program or face possibly losing the boat. See: www.CelebrateLosOsos.org for more information about the Cuesta Inlet boat program. Photos by Pandora Nash-Karner
