Letter: Yes, the Canyon Lake Way

Editor, The Friday Flyer:

I am responding to the letter in your July 9 issue from John Foster, saying and showing with his own amazing candid photo that he had just been hit-and-run by a pontoon boat while on his paddle board near the dock. His board was damaged, but he himself fortunately avoided injury. He concluded that this was “Not the Canyon Lake way.” I wish he were right.

Some years ago I swam in the lake every day for an hour for exercise along the shore in our small cove off the East Bay. I swam mostly breast-stroke, because that gave me better visibility and made me more visible in the water.

On a typical day, in the hour I was swimming, a handful of motorboats would pass through the cove, most of them were speeding, plainly beyond the 5 mph limit. One or two would directly intersect my path and many of those literally ran me over, forcing me to swim or dive for my life.

Of those cumulatively many hundreds of boats crossing my path, hardly any showed any sign that they saw or cared that I was there beneath their speeding hulls and buzz-saw propellers. Most of them surely were paying so little attention or care that they were barely aware that I was there.

But out of the hundreds, surely a number saw me perfectly well, if only “by accident,” and still didn’t act to avoid hitting and very possibly killing me. At the end of the second such season, I reluctantly gave up swimming in the lake for fear of my life.

It’s unfortunately clear that unprotected exercisers in the lake, like bicyclists on the street, have less than no standing, are not infrequently even targets, like dogs in the road.

And yes, the evidence is overwhelming: That is, very sadly, very much the Canyon Lake way. Wish it weren’t so.

  — George Fourmyle