Is it okay to raft at park docks? What is the fee?
Rules and regulations - Fees and good manners
We were having a lively discussion about whether a boater should pay .60 cents a foot for their entire boat's length, or just the portion in front of the float. All we managed to do was come up with more unanswered scenarios.
- If you have a sixty-footer parked at a forty-foot float, do you pay for forty or sixty?
- If your twenty-footer is forced to hang out ten feet because some lunkhead is hogging the dock, do you have to pay for ten or twenty feet? (Half the boat is probably too much in some places)
- If a clown doesn't pull down to the end of the float and leaves seven feet of unusable space, forcing you to anchor, should he have to pay for that seven feet he has wasted
- What if the same bozo parks his thirty-five-footer in the middle of a fifty-foot float and wastes seven and half feet of space at each end, should he pay for the fifty feet he is really hogging?
- Should the park ranger get involved in policing float etiquette?
- Is it ok to move someone's pride and joy seven feet without their permission?
- How about the dinghy taking up space floating at the back end? Should it be counted too?
- When two comedians are rafting at the dock, and the sign says "no rafting," do they pay 60 cents per foot per boat, or just the dock side boat, or the bigger boat
Seriously though, please be considerate and try to maximize dock space, some of our San Juan floats only hold two boats on each side, and our bigger or littler friends may easily wipe out more than they need to. There is not a boat out there that can't hang out a little at the pointed end, and that may make the difference in getting another boat squeezed in at the other end. You can be thanked or cursed, you're the skipper.
- What if a boat's sprit overhangs another's dinghy? Do they split the 60 cents a foot that they are sharing?
- If the anchor buoy you're tied to and already paid for breaks loose and floats away, can you get your fee back?
- If a sailboat rafts with a power boat, who supplies fenders?
Click below for a satellite view of Prevost Harbor
