I am an active recreational…

I am an active recreational boater. From our base at a marina in Kingston my wife and I spend forty or fifty nights each season at anchor at numerous locations around eastern Lake Ontario and in the Thousand Islands. The regulation as proposed would appear to disallow most of our boating activities.

I understand and respect the concerns that the proposed regulatory changes are intended to address but must object to the overreach - probably unintentional - embodied in the proposal.

In broad terms the background provided describes concerns regarding “floating accommodations … floating structures designed principally to provide accommodation for longer stays … rather than for the purposes of camping or navigating.” However, the proposed regulation then appears to place new restrictions on watercraft that in no way meet that definition.

Would it not make more sense to apply the regulation to the specific structures that are the source of the problem rather than to all watercraft equipped for overnight accommodation?

If the true intent is to limit all “camping on water” activities in order to minimize possible nuisances, then the proposed changes are partly but not entirely reasonable.

1. “Reducing the number of days … at one location … to 7 days.” The definitions would need to be more clear but seven days strikes me as unreasonably restrictive - over the navigation season this would be less than two days per month. I would suggest that limiting the number of consecutive days would be a better way to address the issue at hand.

2. “Increasing the distance that a … unit … must move … to 1 kilometer.” This seems generally reasonable - a move of 100 meters is clearly not a move to a different location.

3. “Adding a new condition to prohibit camping on water within 300 meters of a developed shoreline, etc.” This is completely unreasonable and simply does not consider the geographic realities. Anchorages more than 600 meters in size or without any shoreline development are rare to non-existent in the area where we sail; this restriction would be equivalent to telling us that we can no longer use our boat.

In summary, I strongly recommend that the proposed regulation be dropped or significantly changed so that it does not affect the normal activities of reasonable, environmentally responsible, and considerate recreational boaters while attempting to correct an unrelated problem.