Right Column

From the Director's Desk

Director Tsuneyoshi Receives APSEA "Member of the Year" Award

Welcome Aboard!--to Cal Boating's Website. As you will see as you surf our pages, we have a lot of good scuttlebutt to share with you.

Simply put, our mission is to improve access to the water for the recreational boating public, and once they get there, to make sure that boating is as safe as possible. A major step toward accomplishing our mission is providing free boating information to the boating public, and there are expanded opportunities for doing this via the Information Highway. We are taking advantage of this avenue to reach boaters with the latest information on boating safety, education, law, and access.

However, in the interest of extending our outreach as far as possible into the boating community, we have kept our Homepage design simple, so that slower modems may download our pages in a reasonable amount of time.

Another exciting benefit of the Internet is sharing California's experience with people across the country and around the world. Because of California's thousands of miles of waterways and high-energy population, other states and countries look to us to see which way the wind is blowing regarding recreational fads and safety trends. In other words, if it's happening in California, it's probably going to be happening somewhere else. For example,

• California has led the way in boating access and facility design (including Americans With Disabilities Act standards), publishing standardized design guidelines for the construction of boat launching facilities, so that those with fewer resources do not have to reinvent the wheel (or the ramp).
• Safety education for boaters of all ages, law enforcement personnel, and educators. Cal Boating's award-winning aquatic safety educational program, AquaSMART, is in use throughout the California school system, and other states and countries have borrowed from its style and concepts for their own programs.
• Cal Boating has developed scientific methods for studying coastal processes such as real-time wave data gathered by the Coastal Data Information Program (CDIP). CDIP is currently using the instrumentation and technology developed by Cal Boating to monitor the wave action at the Trident Submarine Base in King's Bay Georgia and in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Cal Boating's research on currents and waves in harbors and harbor entrances has been published in scientific journals and used worldwide. Our program routinely supports graduate student work and training, generating a growing pool of experts.
• Water Hyacinth and Egeria densa are choking many areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Cal Boating is the lead agency responsible for treating these non-native aquatic plants which form dense mats of vegetation that obstruct navigation channels, marinas and irrigation systems. Our Aquatic Weed Control Program is permitted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Regional Water Resources Control Board.

We want this to be your Website, so please give us your ideas and advice, via e-mail at pubinfo@dbw.ca.gov. Hope to see you on our magnificent waterways.

Raynor T. Tsuneyoshi
Director