Four men who came from coastal Florida to enjoy a vacation on Lake Sinclair found lodging in Putnam County Jail last week.
Justin Peoples, 18, of Yulee, Fla.; Peyton Casey, 18, of Fernandina Beach, Fla.; William Colby Crabtree, 19, of Jacksonville, Fla.; and Cody Kenneth Mooney, 20, also of Fernandina Beach, all were charged with operating a watercraft under the influence of alcohol. Casey and Crabtree were also charged with failure to obey regulatory water markers, according to Putnam County Jail reports.
Georgia DNR Game Warden First Class Erin Paulk, Game Warden Austin Smith, and DNR Sgt. Ricky Bowles was patrolling Lake Sinclair on Sunday, June 7, and stopped to fill up with gasoline at Lakeside. While doing so, they noticed a boat and two personal watercrafts speeding to a dock at the Lakeside boat ramp.
“There are buoys there because it’s a no-wake zone, so when you cross over into that area, you’re supposed to be at idle speed,” Paulk said. “But they were not at idle speed; they were horsing around and (weaving) around each other, so they were above idle speed.”
After they finished filling up their boat’s gas tank, the game wardens went over to the dock of the boat and PWCs.
“And as we’re getting onto the dock, we can see alcohol,” Paulk said. “We can see there’s a big, tall class of Smirnoff on the dock, and then on the boat, there are beer cans everywhere. And the sheer smell of alcohol, it’s what led us to start investigating. …The whole reason we went over there was that we saw those jet skis violate that no wake zone regulatory markers.”
Two of the men were in the boat, and the other two were on the PWCs, but all four were charged because one of the boaters drove the boat up to the buoy and then swapped places with the passenger, who was more comfortable docking the boat.
Paulk said she and the other game wardens have been pleasantly surprised with the low number of BUIs they’ve encountered while patrolling Lake Sinclair so far this summer.
“It’s been pretty uneventful and pretty chill this year, even on Memorial Day weekend,” she said.
Paulk wanted to reiterate that BUI regulations differ for those under 20. If the boater is 21 or older, the legal limit is .08. Below the age of 20, the legal limit is only .02.
“And that’s even less of an amount. So if you’re 20 or younger, you very easily could be .02, and then you’d be charged with BUI. You don’t want to end up in that type of situation,” she noted.
Instead of BUIs this year, Paulk said they’re seeing many 100-foot violations and wake-ins in no-wake zones. She said the no-wake zones provide safety for people and property. The no-wake zones are around marinas, bridges, public access boat ramps, and blind points.
“If you’re violating the no wake zone, and a business has boats and slips and customers they’re trying to service, you can damage a dock by causing a boat to hit up against a dock; you can damage a boat, or cause a boat to hit somebody and hurt somebody,” Paulk explained.
Similar risks are prevented by the 100-foot law, which requires all vessels to slow to idle speed when operating within 100 feet of docks, piers, shorelines, bridges, swimmers, or moored/ anchored boats.
“If you’re going above idle speed in front of somebody’s dock, you could lose control and hit their dock, hurt yourself, damage your own boat, or you could knock somebody that’s on the dock in the water,” Paulk said. “Or you could hit somebody that’s swimming or on a float around the dock. I mean, there are so many things that could go wrong. …All of those things are a safety concern, and that’s why we’re trying to enforce them.”