Sept 2, 2025

I have always felt that boating brought us a sense of freedom, whether you were sailing along in a stiff breeze, fishing in the early dawn, or cutting across on your slalom ski, boating has always brought a sense of glorious freedom to me. But we are seeing mounting opposition to the freedom we feel from our chosen activities and I think we need to be mindful that there can be gathering forces coming to impose limits on our activities. Even among power boaters, there can be conflicting points of view.

When wake surfing boats made their debut, Ron Huibers, then president of Volvo Penta shared his great enthusiasm for wake surfing, explaining to me that the boat was going slowly, passengers were close and within speaking distance of the surfer and best of all, with minimal instruction, weekend guests could usually get up on a surfboard and actually experience wake surfing. Riding a wake board was far more difficult and getting up was even harder on a slalom ski.

The boat and engine companies have made great progress with wake surfing and now, we have really large wake surfing boats with lots of power, ballast bladders and sophisticated gates and tabs that make powerful big wakes to push riders along.

In a recent email communication from a lobby group called Safe Quiet Lakes, there was a lengthy explanation of how wake surfing boats can produce powerful forces that disturb and “scrub” the lake bottom at shallower depths, (less than 20-feet) stirring up the sediment and potentially blowing away fish nests.

Further, those large waves can damage boats and property at the shoreline and erode the shores over time.

We have often had noise complaints about personal watercraft too. While these are much quieter now than in years past, they are faster, can be more threatening and on the Toronto shoreline, the public is gathering to demand that PWC rentals should be banned.

Maybe it’s the highly politicized environment we seem to be in today but these complaints from the public are a risk for our industry in the long term.

Today, the 2025 Labour Day weekend has passed and our industry gets to take a bit of a step back to consider where we are at as we start to plan the new boat ordering cycle for 2026. We need to be ready to meet the expectations of our customers of course, but perhaps we can guide them to better choices.

This is the sort of topic we should be discussing at industry gatherings like the association conferences this fall and winter.

I hope I see you at those conferences. They are always valuable and productive.

Andy Adams – Editor