Such is the nature of things..
I’d say the biggest issue is the loud music that of course draws attention to the boats in the first place, and in my opinion by and large their music sucks, and no one wats to listen to the messed up music, no other boats on my local lakes hae music blaring.
The next is the total disregard of said wake boaters when it comes to others using the lake, but people suck by and large so that is no surprise. For example, there are a group of fishing boats sitting over a structure or in a place, I’ve seen wake boaters cruising all around them rocking and rolling the fishing boats while blasting their music when there are ample other areas to do their thing, same thing happened when I was kid out with my Dad, the whole lake would be open, I’m taking a lake that was 35 miles long and 7 miles wide, but the water skiers would come and circle around where we were at, man my Dad used to get so pissed. There is one area of my favorite lake I like to call the straight or Hormuz LOL! The wake boats and the pontoon boats towing people are all in this narrow area and come pretty close to each other on a regular basis. Sadly, this is the 2% rule, E.G. 2% of the people mess it up for the rest. I’ve been witness to many wake boaters and skiers that do their best to stay away from people who are fishing or just out for a float keeping their music down or none at all.
Then you have the Karens and Kens of today that just want to sit on the shore and look at the lake, and they think that is the way the lake should be used for the little bit of time that they actually look at it, I’ve dealt with that type of person my whole recreating life as well.
Another very big problem is hidden water that transports the villagers (microscopic larvae-each adult mussel can produce 1M larvae a year) of invasive species like Quagga and Zebra mussels. That problem has come to my closest lake which I wrote a post about some time back. I lay a lot of this problem at the feet of the regulatory agencies, now they have gone to exit inspections instead of pre launch inspections. In my area this problem was known and not that far away but yet nothing was really done until it was too late, these zebra mussels are never going away, and the jewel of the black hills will never be the same. The education and compliance were cursory at best but now will have to be more draconian. There should have been requirements to complete a training before you can get your registration, Utah and Arizona have these programs on the river / lake system of the Colorado river which is now infested by Quagga mussels, and there should have been facilities in place wherein folks could have taken their boats to decontaminate them. So now, there is a 10 day “dry time” which will become a 30 day dry time as soon as the weather cools a bit more. This dry time is supposed to be a pre requisite before getting on other lakes in the area unless a decon is done. (Im so glad I tightened up my boat and no water comes out now) The caveat here is that if you show up at another lake inside the dry time period the inspectors will inspect your boat very thoroughly and if they find water they have a decon unit mounted on a trailer and they will decon your boat.
I’m going to wager that it is far too late and that all the lakes have these mussels in them already.
Shoreline erosion and wakes hitting docks are another concern. The wake thing against the docks could be taken care of pretty easily by expanding the no wake zones, of course then the regular boats are going to scream… and if these types of regs go through the non boater types will pounce and make hey with that.
The best way to stave off ridiculous regulations is for self regulation.
