Do boats leave big problems in their wake?

In the boating community, of which I’m a member, there has been some discussion recently about the negative effects of the wash or wake that boats produce.

The debate is pretty well confined to the effects on sheltered inland waterways where there are no large natural waves.

With people having a bit more money to spend there has been a big increase in the number of speed boats, jet skis and very fast cruisers on our lakes and rivers. They can produce a considerable wash that can cause erosion to the banks of rivers and canals. It can also cause annoyance to anglers sitting quietly on a lake shore or somebody on a slow cruiser who’s lifting a kettle of boiling water off his gas ring.

Local authorities have actually banned fast boats from some waterways in the country and there have been calls for the introduction of speed limits or “no wake zones” in other sensitive spots.

Another thing that’s often mentioned in the debate is the effect of excessive boat wash on wildlife. I’ve become interested in this subject and I understand that The Heritage Council is working on a study, not yet published, of the effects of boat wash on heritage in general. The problem is that there’s a shortage of data.

As far as I can discover, no research has been done on the subject in this country and little or no research that’s really relevant in any other country. An internet search did throw up a study of the effects of speedboat traffic on pelicans in Florida but this didn’t seem comparable to conditions on the Shannon. I contacted BirdWatch Ireland but they didn’t seem to be able to find anything either.

So then I thought that it would be a very useful subject for something like a postgraduate zoology student from one of our universities to research. But when I began to wonder how you’d go about assembling data on the effects of boat wash on wildlife I realised it wouldn’t be that easy.

The difficulty lies in the fact that ethical research would have to monitor the effects of the disturbance without actually doing any disturbing.

The most vulnerable species are probably water birds that build floating nests in reed-beds or other bank-side vegetation. Boat wash has the potential to swamp these nests, possibly chilling eggs, drowning chicks or causing the parent birds to desert the nest. On our inland waterways vulnerable species would include coots, water-hens, great-crested and little grebes and water rails.

THE best idea I have come up with is that researchers should locate the nests of some of these birds using non-invasive techniques. A Canadian style canoe has the ability to travel very quietly and unobtrusively through beds of reeds or sedges, even in very shallow water.

The nests should then be monitored closely until the birds have finished with them — in other words, until the last brood of chicks has left.

Then the researchers could take over the nests and mount video cameras, motion sensors or whatever at the site.

After that it would be only a matter of driving various different types of boat (large and small, fast and slow, and so on) at measured distances from the nest and collecting the data. It would be a fairly simple research project but I believe the results would provide the first hard information on an important and controversial subject.

There you are then. I don’t really have the right sort of contacts with third-level institutions, but somebody out there must have. I think it needs doing and I think I’d have no difficulty in getting any number of boat owners to help out with the wash trials. Anybody interested in taking it on?

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