The Florida legislature began a special session this week intending to prop up the state’s homeowner insurance industry. Meanwhile, insurance, or the lack of it, could doom the state’s boat rental businesses due to a new measure passed last summer in the state’s “Boating Safety Act of 2022.”

In essence, all boat rental companies in the Sunshine State will be required to carry insurance on the customers renting their boats in the event of injury or loss beginning Jan. 1. The insurance companies, never mind rental operators, are cringing at the new requirement.

According to estimates from some insurers, doing so will raise rates from about $1,500 per boat annually to more than $8,000 per boat. Lobbyist Peggy Mathews, speaking for the American Watercraft Association, recently told the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission that the requirement will cripple the industry unless the legislature amends the law in the next session.

Her position was documented by Joe Bamdas, vice president of Miami-based rental operator Riva Motorsports, which also has operations in Key Largo. “With the new bill, rental operators will not be able to obtain insurance, or if they can, the cost will be so prohibitive that they could not stay in business,” Bamdas says. He has further noted that Riva will face laying off employees and abandoning expansion plans.

To be clear, the new law defines a rental operation as any person who advertises and offers a vessel for use by another in exchange for consideration when there is no captain, crew or any type of personnel provided to operate, oversee, maintain or manage the vessel.

Further, the law requires that liveries obtain a no-cost, annual livery permit and implement certain safety requirements. It also requires obtaining and carrying in full force and effect an insurance policy that insures the livery and the renter. There is an insurance exemption for human-powered vessels.

Without any assurance that lawmakers might strike the insurance demand in their next regular legislative session, the FWC commissioners had to follow through and approve compliance rules for the new law. However, FWC has also indicated it will favor an educational approach to enforcement for at least the first six months of 2023, contending that violators “should be educated and warned about the new laws.”

Like so much national and state legislation these days, no one immediately knows all that’s in the 100-page missive Florida’s that lawmakers began meeting about yesterday. The hope is that somewhere in the final document is a simple, short line repealing the rental insurance requirement. But it bears watching because it seems likely other states are watching.

Trout in the Cuyahoga

Boaters are conservationists, so let’s all enjoy this story.

Dan Armitage, host of Buckeye Sportsman, Ohio’s longest running outdoors radio show, recently hailed the stocking of 1,000 rainbow trout in the Cuyahoga River. Wait, we’re talking about the river that runs through Cleveland, the river that literally burned?

“The Cuyahoga River has been stocked with about 1,000 rainbow trout,” Armitage told anglers and conservationists across the Buckeye State. “That’s amazing when you consider that the northeast Ohio flow was once a national punchline for water pollution, catching on fire June 22, 1969.”

The “river that burned” became an iconic moment that led to the passage of the nation’s Clean Water Act. And now, rainbow trout will be swimming there, along with other fish that are regularly caught while anglers and boaters ply the Cuyahoga in everything from kayaks to motoryachts.

The trout release was a combined effort by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Western Reserve chapter of Trout Unlimited and the upstream city of Cuyahoga Falls. “This is unprecedented. I don’t know that this has ever happened in the river, so now it’s stocked,” said Cuyahoga Falls mayor Don Walters.

“Trout will live in super-clean waters now, and they’re elusive,” Walters said, “so the trout that we released, they’re not all going to get caught this year. They’re going to grow, and they’re going to be there.”