[ApS]

Originally Posted by jrc

"...Displacement boats make a big wake just like planing boats..."

Just for the record, displacement boats include canoes, kayaks, rowboats, and most sailboats; however, nearly anything (see photo below) with enough power -- like a deep-Vee -- can be made to plane.

Originally Posted by Dave R

If that's what it takes, yeah. The fact is, erosion is never ever going to stop. You can either live with it or slow it down to a manageable level. It may take a lot of money or hard work or both....Some nice level lots are perfect for beaches, but you need to expect them to change over time, if left alone. I see all kinds of walls, dams, jetties and such on the shore where erosion would obviously be a problem otherwise; somebody had to build them, and it wasn't free.

Building walls isn't recommended, according to Wikipedia:

"...Seawalls are effective defenses in the short term, but may cause erosion in the long run..."

At my winter lakefront property, the Florida DES-equivalent doesn't allow walls around lakes. The velocity of runoff on abutting properties chews away at the abutter's properties. The sand directly in front of the wall is washed deeper into the lake: A lose-lose proposition.

Here, the beach I had gained in a previous rainstorm (July 6th, 1999, 4:28PM) has long since disappeared. This April, developers dumped huge amounts of "fill" uphill, and "sand" next door on a new houselot. When the rains stopped, I again got "a beach", albeit with a fine coating of Memorial Day mud.

That "new" sandy beach won't stay either.

Originally Posted by Dave R

"...Some lots are naturally more resistant to erosion, but they likely lack nice beaches..."

While I'd like to have a permanent beach, beaches are not the end-game of Mother Nature.

Having been left in forest, my acre lot still sheds mud into the lake. Mud (actually natural soil created by Nature's "duff"—mixed with sediment) gets gradually washed downhill to the water's edge, where it waits to be washed into the lake.

The shifting of shorefront rocks due to erosion [natural and artificial] causes trees and supporting rocks to shift taking still more more mud (soil/silt) with it, and more rocks to shift into place. While the process has been ongoing since the glaciers left, our generation has never seen the wakes that are mashing the shoreline today. At those times that the lake assumes its present extreme level (even by millennia standards), big wakes do immense damage.

The enduring beaches are those that Mother Nature put there. Velocity of runoff will increase silt levels, decrease underwater visibility levels, and create favorable milfoil habitat. The 600' limitation of wakes is a ridiculous measure. I mean, why aren't the wakes "listening"?

The communities that surround the Mount's route are mostly equipped with DES-approved breakwaters anyway. Everyone else off the beaten track are getting soaked—with dock repair costs—or by the monster wakes which loosen pilings and rock cribs, just waiting for winter's mischief to finish them off.

OTOH, New Hampshire's "shortsightedness" (for lack of a less cynical term) doesn't have to pay for waterfront damage—insurance does!

With the State's reliance on tourists for state income, this will mean more commercial structures, more pavement, more parking spaces, and increased runoff velocity into Lake Winnipesaukee.

New Hampshire, with its "urged" limits and myopic 600-foot "wake limit", isn't eating its seed corn, it's selling it.