WillBoat update

As I announced last month, some 6 weeks ago, my new boater's access advocacy company has made some great organizational strides.

I have a fine Executive Director on board. He's an experienced hand, having run several conservative political campaigns, and knows the ins and outs of fund-raising. He found me a fine conservative corporate attorney, and yesterday we had our first sit-down. The barrister has corrected a few errors in my incorporations filing. None of them were fatal, but his fine-tuning has now made it possible for me to add a charitable foundation to the mix. Most corporate donors will want to have a tax break, and now they will.

This next week, we get to work on ordering the staff identity apparel, all to be adorned with WillBoat's logo:

So, with the graphic designs in the can, the web work begins this next week as well. Of course, there will be a link when it's up. After that, some exposition materials to get us ready for our big public debut at the NW Sportsmen's Expo, Feb 8-12, here in Portland.

All the while, the corporate attorney is at work preparing to serve the City of Portland with a demand for my company to have Intervenor status in the City's ongoing atempts to grab control of the very public Willamette River which flows through Portland. WillBoat vs. The City of Portland will be the first skirmish for us. The harder the City fights us, the more publicity we get, the more donations will come in, and the stronger we will get.

The sad fact is that sportsmen stood around here, and elsewhere in the USA, while the environmental movement got THEIR advocacy going first and locked us out of our own public forests. Now that the public woods are effectively closed to us, the greens have their eyes on closing off or restricting  motor-driven boating from some rivers and lakes, and they've already succeeded somewhat in doing THAT.

I started WillBoat to stand in that breach, and end this onslaught on freedom of boater's access before it gets any farther.

Wish me luck. It's a big job, but no one else is doing it, and it MUST be done.

 

Comments

[PawPaw]

Good for you! There must be some jurisprudence there (I know that it exists in Louisiana) about the rights of the public on a navigable waterway. Basically, the law here is that anyone can use a navigable waterway unless there are compelling temporary reasons to close it, (no wake zones during floods, etc.) As much as we boat here in the Gret Stet of Louisiana, anyone trying to close a navigable waterway would be laughed out of court, and shunned by a majority of the population. The waterways belong to everyone.

[Rivrdog]

PawPaw, the problems is not so much the gummint(s) trying to restrict actual navigation, it's all the supporting things they are restricting to try to kill off powerboating. For some time, it's been illegal to build a dock over a certain width, unless it lets the light though it's planking (meaning fiberglass planking). Boathouses, the same. Your roof must be about half translucent fiberglass to let light in, supposedly so predatory warm-water fish won't prey on the salmon smolts as they swim downriver to grow up into big salmon at sea. Marinas that sell gas are another thing. There used to be about 3 or 4 fuel docks on the Willamette River through Portland, now there are none between Oregon City (the falls that end free navigation on the lower river) and the head of Multnomah Channel, almost all the way to the Columbia River confluence. That's over 25 miles with no fuel available for the thousands of powerboats using that stretch of the river. I doubt that any other major river system flowing though a big city is that short of fuel.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Now the City is full enough of their own crap that they actually put these ideas of killing off powerboating down on paper and say it's a good thing. They're idiots, and I am the anti-idiotarian.