@PrivatePilot Sounds like you miss them!
One aspect I like about this sport is no popo around, or limited popo. With sportbikes comes that whole losing your license paranoia.
Hahah...whoa there on the "No police". Jetskis are police magnets. If there are police anywhere on the water rest assured you are going to get a visit, even if you're not actually even riding agressively or doing anything to attract them.
It's unfortunate, but jetskis carry the same stigma on the water as a 'Busa being ridden by a 16 year old squid does on land. It's automatically assumed by pretty much everyone (including the police) that you are a bunch of infractions waiting for the picking, so make sure to have all your ducks in a row - proper paperwork, your pleasurecraft operators licence, ALL the required safety equipment, etc. We always carried extra things on top of that (a collapsable oar, extra flashlights, etc) to show that we were actually carrying over and above the required equipment, but we got stopped (without a word of a lie) probably at least 50% of the time we were on the water. We
expected it.
Also take note that this stigma, not undeservedly (because a lot of jetski operators are just ******** and do ******* types of things) are disliked by a lot of others on the water, so don't expect to show up at the sandbar party and get a warm reception from everyone...sometimes it's like showing up at Sturgis on a Vespa. HOW you arrive can carry a lot of weight, so slow down a long way out and putter carefully and slowly into docks/moorages/canals/no wake areas etc etc - this is another thing lost on many Jetski owners who think the rules (and more importantly, etiquette!!) need not apply to them, or just make idiotic decisions like roaring into the middle of a sandbar party...because everyone loves having their boats rocked off their anchors, waves everywhere, etc..right?
Again, it's an unfortunate situation where a lot of hooligan Jetski riders have given them really bad names, so everyone gets painted with the same brush - even though my wife and I are were far from the stereotypical 20 or 30-something hooligan riders (and when I *did* get up to shenanigans, I would do it in the middle of the lake all by myself, not 15 feet off the end of cottagers docks, or endlessly buzzing the sandbar parties kicking up waves and rocking boats, etc) so I wasn't bothering anyone.
Anyhow, my point is...don't think you're not going to be bothered by the OPP. You will be. Expect it. If you have all your required gear onboard and in proper operating condition (Flashlights are a hard one to keep working, Jetskis like to smash/destroy/nearly liquify things you put in their storage compartments) most of the checks we went through were little more then "Hey, how are you, have you had anything to drink today" affairs, and when they asked for paperwork and I'd stand up and lean over the handlebars in an effort to retrieve it from the front hatch (at which point they'd see the *extra* safety equipment like our collapsable oars, etc) they'd tell us to have a good day and we'd be on our way. Only maybe 10% of the time did they actually want us to remove every single piece of safety equipment to show it was all working, check out every single piece of paperwork, our licences, etc etc..but you'd best make sure you have it all, trust me.
