Keeping bad boating behavior at bay

As Chuck Naiser skippered his 20-foot flats skiff across a slick Aransas Bay on the way to the ramp at Goose Island State Park after a fine morning of stalking redfish on the area’s shallow flats this past week, he nodded toward Blackjack Peninsula a few hundred yards to starboard.

Four wadefishers were lined up a couple of casts off the shoreline and downwind of their anchored boat as they worked parallel to the bank and toward an area holding a patch of oyster shell and, they hoped, a few redfish or speckled trout.

From behind the waders, a boat filled with other anglers approached. Instead of turning his vessel to take it toward the open bay, swinging wide of the anglers ahead of him, the boat operator bored straight ahead, blowing between the waders and the shoreline and directly over the water the waders were aiming to fish.

Naiser, Troy Utz and I looked at each other, the three of us slowly shaking our heads.

We were shaking our heads again just a few minutes later as we approached the Goose Island boat ramp, where a boater had positioned his vessel to take up all the space on the only not-wholly-occupied side of the dock, a boating version of someone parking a car so that it takes up four spaces in a parking lot.

Then, as Utz walked to get Naiser’s truck and boat trailer so we could load the vessel, a truck pulled into the ramp area and parked square in the section vehicles trying to launch or retrieve boats use to maneuver their rigs. The occupants disgorged from the truck and walked over to visit with friends, forcing Utz to do some slick trailer backing to avoid the obstacle.

“You just witnessed some of the behavior we’re working to change,” Naiser said as we drove away.

‘We had to try’

The “we” in Naiser’s comments are members and supporters of FlatsWorthy, an organization Naiser helped found four years ago with the goal of “promoting respect for all bay users, respect for the resources and habitat of these bays and respect for the law,” he explained.

It was an action all but forced on him and the core group of Rock-port area fishing guides and private anglers such as Utz, he said.

“Things just got to a point where we had to try doing something or risk seeing the situation just get worse,” said Naiser, the organization’s president.

Naiser, an East Bernard native who began fishing the magical matrix of bays in the Rockport area in 1967, has lived there for 40 years and worked as a full-time fishing guide since 1992, focusing on introducing anglers to the storied shallow-water fishery in the vibrant, sea grass-carpeted flats and back-bay lakes of the Aransas Bay complex.

Those waters, like all along the Texas coast, have become much more crowded as the state’s population has boomed. The number of saltwater anglers in Texas has more than doubled in the past 20 years, and so has the number of boats plying those waters.

“They are making more boats. They aren’t making more water,” Naiser said.

And those boats and the anglers who use them are, like Texas’ population, increasingly diverse. Specifically, boats that can negotiate the often inches-deep flats once all but off limits to those not willing to make extraordinary effort have exploded — airboats, kayaks, personal watercraft such as Jet Skis, and big and wide fishing boats powered by massive outboards fit with jack plates and low-water pickups that can run in water less than a foot deep.

The result has been a surge in congestion and conflicts triggered by some boaters violating unwritten (and often written) rules governing boating and fishing behavior.

Among the most common violations is a behavior termed “burning” an area, when boaters run helter-skelter through shallow flats or long distances along shorelines other anglers are fishing, scattering what fish might be there. Some boaters, like the one we watched along Blackjack Peninsula, will blatantly run their boats near waders or kayakers. It’s a behavior that, at best, ruins fishing prospects and, at worst, can lead to dangerous or even tragic consequences.

Some boaters violate written rules, especially in coastal areas where shallow-running powerboats damage protected sea grass or operators of airboats and air-cooled “mud motors” drive their boats into the marshes and estuaries rimming the bays, destroying both aquatic and terrestrial habitat.

Some of the behaviors don’t damage fishing prospects but can frustrate and even ruin others’ opportunities to enjoy time on the water. That can be something as simple as hogging space on a boat ramp pier or causing traffic stack-ups at launches by not prepping and loading boats before backing down the ramp.

Or it can be the increasingly common behavior of boaters cranking up the sound systems optional on many new fishing boats, forcing everyone within miles to endure electronic sounds instead of the natural music of the coast.

“It all comes down to mutual respect for each other and respect for the resource,” said Utz, a FlatsWorthy member who lives in Houston but spends a lot of time fishing the shallow, increasingly crowded bays of the middle and lower coast. “These bays are all of our playgrounds, and they are wonderful places that belong to us all. We want everyone to enjoy these special, sensitive places, but practice responsible behavior.”

Ignorance isn’t bliss

Some of the problematic boating behavior — the “jackassery” as Naiser terms it — stems from outright hubris. But much of it comes from a lack of awareness of the unwritten rules of boating, he and Utz say. And addressing that is much of FlatsWorthy’s focus.

“We want to help educate people. Make them aware of the consequences of their actions,” Utz said. “We don’t want to restrict the boats people use or anyone’s access to areas. We just want to help them understand how we can all make the bays better places for all of us, now and into the future.”

To that end, the Rockport-based organization works to bring together diverse groups of boaters to discuss problems they see and seek to come up with solutions all can agree to. Through the young group’s first four years, they have met with groups of fishing guides to address problematic boating behavior.

Guides, Naiser said, are a crucial group FlatsWorthy targets because these professionals are on the water almost every day and see the problems firsthand. They also have outsized influence on the boating community through their contacts with other boaters and especially their customers. Those customers run the gamut of angling/boating experience, from novices to veterans.

A big part of a guide’s job is education, and customers tend to mimic the behaviors they learn from guides, Naiser said.

“They can really raise awareness of a lot of people,” he said.

FlatsWorthy also has partnerships with private, academic and government groups to help spread the word about responsible boating and fishing behavior as well as working together on education and habitat improvement projects.

One of the Rockport FlatsWorthy group’s most visible early efforts was working with the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to close and rehabilitate a habitat-damaging cut created by airboats repeatedly (and illegally) running over emergent marsh to create a shortcut to a back-bay lake.

But the group also is working with groups such as the Harte Research Institute, University of Texas Marine Science Institute and Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program in habitat -related projects.

More information on the organization is available on their website, flatsworthy.com.

Until recently, FlatsWorthy had one chapter — the original one centered in Rockport. But the group recently established a new Lower Laguna Madre chapter, and there is building interest in establishing a chapter on the upper coast, at Galveston Bay in particular.

“Really, we’re just a fairly small group or committed people pretty much making it up as we go,” Naiser said. “But what we’re doing is resonating with people. We know we’re not going to change things overnight. It’s an education process and it’s got to be an ongoing thing. There is no finish line, just continually educating people and making them aware.

“That’s the only way to make a difference. It’s the responsibility of those of us who grew up on these bays and know what’s a stake to try to make things better.”

It’s a big challenge and responsibility. But all it takes to understand the need to do it is to spend time on a Texas bay on just about any summer day. shannon.tompkins@chron.com

Twitter: @chronoutdoors