Is this an accurate portrayal of the area where the crash occurred? Was it a NWZ?

There is a law about drinking and driving = but there are still floating cocktail parties
There is a law for unskilled boaters = but there are still people who have never taken a safe boating course

Now they want to install a 10mph limit at night...

If they can't enforce the first 2 that are alrready on the books how the heck are they going to enforce this one?

GAME ON............:angry-smiley-038:

dave not for nothing BUT honestly thanks for all you do bro.

:grinser010: I agree

I just received an apology from Ed King who sent the "Murderous Scum" Email.

"Dave, You are right, please accept my apology."

Apology accepted!

Email sent

Here is my actual response:

Ed,

Thank you for your email - apology accepted!

On Sunday morning when I learned of the accident the first thing I did was call the State Police in Pt. Pleasant and Trooper Rich Capputo to volunteer my services to help find the speedboat.

We want to petition the NJ Legislature to INCREASE the funding of the NJ State Police Marine Bureau so accidents like this don't happen again. The NJ State Police are WAY under funded to cover all of the Waterways of NJ especially the Metedeconk and Barnegat Bay. There are tons of laws that are already on the books that need enforcement.............

Help us get more funding to put more Troopers on the waters to help protect all of us. It would be a geat way to honor your friend.

We know what it is like to lose a close friend. He didn't die in a boating accident but of cancer at the age of 38 two years ago. He was a huge part of our club, a great guy, huge heart and always giving to those less fortunate. His name was Scott Applegate. One of his last wishes was to do his last poker run with us.

http://www.lucidideefastboats.com/im...Our_Hearts.wmv

He died 8 weeks after most of the photos in this video were taken.

Please express our greatest sympathies to the Post family and that we will do all we can to try and make the waterways safer so something like this never happens again.

Best Regards,
Dave Patnaude
President
NJ Performance Powerboat Club
www.njppc.com

A great start. Now it's time for them to wait to see what happened, and hold their tongues and proposals. It's no wonder silly laws get passed all the time. The cops must go crazy trying to remember them all, much less get fuel for their boats :greenchainsaw:

Dave, you are a class act.
Ric Monteiro

BTW, I also shot an email to the Sen.

I sent my copy out to all of the Senators.

Already getting the Auto-Replies back.

(For immediate attention on a matter please call #.)


If you reside in Senate District 25 and need immediate assistance with a state issue, please phone my office at 973 627-9700

From Senator Gill: If this is a matter that needs our immediate attention, please feel free to contact my district office at 973-509-0388.


Thanks again Dave ! :ernaehrung004:

I knew after yesterday's call it was only the beginning... :rolleyes:

that was a different brother from the same mother:eek: [sp] lee harvey oslweld killed john, sirhan did Bobby in:( and we got stuck with the moron brother teddy:mad: oh and you should always stop and try to save a life even if they hit you, also always wait for the facts to come out, before putting boot in mouth oops, but this is just sad for all. I don't boat at night cause I seen to much stupid chit during the day.

Here is a copy of a great letter to the Senator from our member Bob Christie:

Dear Senator Sarlo:

It was with great regret that I learned of the boating tragedy that took place this past Saturday night. While I did not personally know any of the boaters involved, my deepest thoughts and prayers go out to all involved. It was truly a tragedy that is upsetting in many ways, not the least of which was your irresponsible statements to the press trying to blame all power boaters in New Jersey.

As a resident of New Jersey for 54 years, an avid boater for almost 40 of those years and the owner of a boating business in New Jersey, it concerns me that you have taken a tragedy of this magnitude to try and further your political agenda. The State Police and the prosecutors office have not finalized their investigation at this time, yet you have assumed that someone was drinking with your statement that "speeding combined with floating cocktail parties and unskilled boaters are recipes for disaster." Do you know something that the police do not know ? Do you know if any of the drivers were not carrying a valid boat safety certification card? Do you know if anyone was drinking that was involved? Do you know if either boat had legal running lights on? If you do, I would assume that you know more than the authorities and should volunteer your first hand knowledge to the police. So if I am to follow your unfounded logic, then if someone dies in a car accident at night, should we ban cars from driving at night, or reduce the speed limit on the New Jersey Turnpike at night, or the Garden State Parkway at night? How many people die in car accidents at night? If a plane crashes at Newark airport in the evening, should we ban night flights or maybe ask them to land their planes a bit slower? New Jersey is one of the largest boating communities per capita in the United States and it's safety record is one of the VERY best. So how is it when there is one terrible and regrettable accident that comes to your attention that you go to the press and try and penalize everyone else.

New Jersey has some of the toughest safe boating laws in the country. We also have laws against driving and drinking. We have laws that require proper lights on all boats at night? We have laws that require that you drive at a safe speed based upon current conditions. New Jersey is doing a great job of protecting boaters through it's current laws and setting a great example to other states. So why is it that you are convinced we need Speed Limits on the tidal waters at night? If someone drinks and drives a boat at night, or takes drugs and drives a boat at night, or drives at any speed without running lights, or operates a boat without a proper legal certification, will your law have any impact on them; most likely not. You are trying to penalize the many for the possible sins of a few. Those that wish to break the law will not be any more careful because you have created new laws. I make no assumptions or accusations in this current tragedy because I do not know the facts and until they are known, neither should you. But you have already gone to the press and talked about changing laws with no basis or facts. Could it be that you just do not like power boaters?

As a registered voter, and one of many thousands of registered boaters in the State of New Jersey, I think you owe the families of the injured a formal apology for making it sound as if they were drinking and reckless without any facts. Further I believe you owe all boaters in New Jersey an formal apology in the same newspapers that you went to already, for jumping to the conclusion that because of one accident, everyone that boats breaks the law and should be penalized.

My family and friends continue to pray for the injured in hopes that they can make a full recovery. As for Robert Post's death, there are no words to describe how saddened I am by the loss of his life and the impact that it will continue to have on his friends and family. As a public official, maybe you could get off your high horse for a few weeks, allow the police to do their investigation and send condolences to the injured and grieving through the news paper rather than try and further a political agenda that will not have any impact on the next tragedy that occurs.

Robert S. Christie
President/CEO
3E Company

Let me make this CLEAR !!!

No one has any factual proof that any HIN (numbers) were being sanded or grinded off that I am aware of, but yet people keep posting it. :mad:

If the HIN is missing from the transom that is because the boat was completely redone and they may have forgotten to put the numbers back onto the hull. This had nothing to do with the accident ! I have pics of the boat with no numbers on the transom from 3 years ago. They certainly did not grind a transom when no numbers were present to begin with.

The only place I see any numbers scratched off was the registration number on the starboard side where the impact from the crash allegedly took place. Port side is still intact.

So can we please refrain from making those type of allegations ? Thank you........

Well said Bob !!!

Somebody may want to contact Roger Brown to make sure he has enough room for his next Commission meetting !

They are used to having I think 20 or less people come to those meetings...

Something tells me this next meeting will be well over triple digits... :eek:

chill man:rolleyes: I posted right after I read the post from bobcat and now got to the end of this thread, so I will delete it off sparky, spanky I mean sharkey:p

I will be there

When we went to Trenton it was standing room only ....:eek:

Dave I want to thank you for all you do for performance boating in NJ, I dont boat there but I think it is great that you fight for all of us, let me know what I can do to help out, I dont boat in NJ. but it is close to home, Thanks again.

Dave:

I applaud your efforts year in and year out. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don't but you never give up and that, bro, is worthy of all of our respect.

One other thing, you are definitely not "Murderous Scum", and I should know..........

Yours truly,

"Cantankerous Scum".....T2x

P.S....Please post the senator's e-mail address so that we might support your efforts en masse.

Very interesting that what Texoma was getting bashed for 2 pages ago by OSO members, Dave P is being applauded for by OSO members. Don't get me wrong, Dave, you're the man, just think some of the bashing of Tex was unwarranted.

There is truly very little difference in what the Senator said publicly and what many OSO'ers were saying when this thread got started.

Thanks for the kudos but Texoma was making assumptions i.e.:

"27ft Boat had right of way"
"In my book that means 2 drivers were at fault"

Alot different from my point of view that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED except for those who were there. Soon, the police and the prosecutors office will know what happened after their investigation.

Thanks Rich!

My batting average would be equal to a hall of famer if this was baseball! ;)

And don't you mean "Obsolete Cantankerous Scum"???? :evilb:

Thanks again to everyone's support. We need to stay the course of presenting the facts and the facts are that there are already enough laws on the books but they cannot be effectively enforced because there are not enough State Police on the water.

Senator Sarlo's email is: [email protected]

All of the other NJ State Senators are:

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected],

Email sent! I usually don't get involved with stuff like this but sometimes you have to draw the line.

Dave, you are the man and have all my RESPECT! Thank You for everything. Augie "Godfather" Pensa, VP of OPA Racing and President of The Jersey Boyz.

IMP/Squadron pix
 

http://www.ameriserv.net/boat

Colreg 72
 

Maybe its time to get some better night lights on our vessels, but the COLREG was written in 1972 and by law, you can't use anything "brighter" I wonder if a louder boat would have given them more warning"

What a sad story = my heart goes out the the family

I'm with you Oreo on the lights. Sometimes even the stern lights are pretty hard to see, much less the red/green. How about LED's?

This boat was plenty loud.

If this was the same boat I heard coming up the inlet and then ran outside for a bit, I had no problem hearing it over the music at Jenkinson. I will have to go back to see if I had any pics of it in the inlet. It was too far away for the camera I had that night so I know it wouldn't be all that clear. Plus it was already getting dark by then.

I thought that was a Baja

Might have been.

I did not get a good look at it. Do you know for sure?

Not a 100 %

I found nothing but 1 commercial fishing vessel I shot coming in the inlet.

Widow seeks crash witnesses

Sunday boat accident killed her husband

By MARGARET F. BONAFIDE
STAFF WRITER

The widow of the man who was killed in a hit-and-run boating collision on the Metedeconk River on Sunday is pleading with the public to come forward with information to help law enforcement with the investigation.

Bonnie Post, 52, who was critically injured in the early-morning collision, was released Wednesday from Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and is preparing for her husband's funeral services, which will be held Saturday in Caldwell.

Post, through her attorney, is asking people who may have seen the speedboat involved in the crash anytime last Saturday night or Sunday morning to come forward and help explain how or why the operator of the speedboat "left the scene of a horrendous crash where she and her friends could have easily drowned," Post said in a statement released Thursday.

Post is being represented by Daniel J. Carluccio of Carluccio, Leone, Dimon Doyle and Sacks in Toms River. Carluccio is a former Ocean County prosecutor.

"Mrs. Post suffered serious personal injuries when her husband's boat was run down. The crash also injured three friends on the Post's boat," Carluccio said in his statement.

Sgt. Valentino Borrelli, who is part of the investigative team going over the evidence,
said that a boat owned by Anthony Digilio, 29, of Brick was involved in a collision. This was determined after authorities got a search warrant.

Cliff and Joan Farren of Pennsylvania, 45 and 46 respectively, and Karen Kelly of Georgia were on the 16-foot Boston Whaler Katama with the Posts when the boat was run over, killing Robert Post, authorities said.

The Whaler had previously been reported by authorities as being 17 feet in length.

Eyewitnesses told investigators that the boat that hit them kept going, never slowing or stopping to assist them.

William Cunningham, an attorney and former member of the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, is representing Digilio. He said his client was riding on the river about the same time the fatal collision occurred, although he denied any knowledge of having hit a boat with five people aboard. Cunningham said his client told him that he believed that his boat struck a log in the water.

Digilio and his girlfriend, Krista Behrend of Brick, had been out for a ride on the ocean in the early hours of Sunday morning. Cunningham said they were heading back and planned to place the boat onto a lift at a home on the Metedeconk River. In the morning, Digilio and his father, Joseph Digilio of Brick, took the boat home to survey the damage, Cunningham said.

The authorities have not been able to speak to Digilio or his girlfriend since the
incident. Behrend also has enlisted an attorney, authorities said.

The fatal collision has brought heavy criticism upon the entire speedboating population, said Dave Patnaude, president of the New Jersey Performance Powerboat Club.

The criticism is unwarranted, he said, because people are drawing conclusions before the law enforcement has had the opportunity to conduct a thorough investigation.

The collision occurred in a channel of water called Gunners Ditch, which is at the eastern most end of Metedeconk River, starting at the Mantoloking Bridge. It is primarily a no-wake passage zone to the northern most end of Barnegat Bay, Patnaude explained.

"I have been through there at night," Patnaude said. "It is extremely dark, and there
was very little moonlight" last weekend.

"I don't agree that he drove over the boat and that he did not know it," Patnaude said.
"One thousand percent, I believe this is a god-awful tragedy."

Patnaude said that Digilio is not a member of the Performance Powerboat Club.

"The thing I have a problem with is a rush to judgment as to what" the cause was,
Patnaude said.

"There are so many (unknown) things," he said. "Was alcohol involved on one boat and or both boats, or did both boats have their navigational lights on and functioning, were they in a no-wake zone, and what speed and direction was each boat going?"

Patnaude said this is a time to gather facts about what happened, help police with
information and wait for the answers. Calls for new laws lowering the nighttime boating speed limit are not necessary, he said, because the current laws are sufficient if State Police have the staffing to enforce them.

Cuts to the state budget have left a small number of State Police available to enforce the current laws, Patnaude said, and that is obvious on the waterways in the state patrolled by the marine bureau.

"The State Police presence on the Metedeconk and Barnegat Bay has been minimal," Patnaude said. "Everything across the state has been cut back."

The marine police presence is "slim on the bay and the river because they don't have the money to put out a decent-size force," Patnaude said.

Dave, I don't live in NJ anymore, but still thank you for the effort you put forth in the past, as well as all the effort you'll need to put into this latest round of the same old thing.

folks, if you go to www.app.com , take a quick peek at the comments accompanying these stories. You'll get a look at what Dave and other NJ boaters have to deal with.......

Here's an example:

Replying to seagoat22:

NGH144 wrote: "These types of boats are used for just 2 things. Raceing and drug smuggling. Since there was no race at 1 AM that leaves one thing.".......no NGH, actually three things.......you forgot, 'Guido' uses this type of boat to announce to the whole freakin' world that he's arriving at the waterside bar so that everybody sees his gold necklaces, pinky rings, steroid-injected body and bleach-blonde bimbo. We've all seen the type. It's part of Guido's 'culture'.....he can't help it.


AWESOME POST!!! I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY
8/8/2008 8:19:50 AM

I see postings there from Activator22? That someone on the board? Seems like it...........

Thanks Gary!

Update from the letter & email front:

I received an email from Senator Andy Ciesla. I have known Andy for a while and his email was very candid and I will not post it on here as it was a private email. But....

His closing line in the email was "At this point…..I think we all wait………an absence of fact makes bad law."

So true!

We received 2 very nice emails from the BBYRA

Toms River, NJ - August 8, 2008

Update from the letter & email front:

I received the following very nice email from Bob Morrow & Rich Proko who are Commodore & Vice Commodore of the Barnegat Bay Yacht Racing Assoc. www.bbyra.org

It was great to receive such emails from them. This is a true testament to the greatly improved relations we have forged with the sailing community on Barnegat Bay over the last 5 years.

The following are the emails....

************************************************** ***********
Dave,
I have watched with sadness the news stories on TV about the tragedy on the water last weekend. My sadness only deepened when I witnessed the unfortunate and unwarrented attack on all performance power boaters by one of the BBYRA's own members.

Please know, as I believe you already do, that the impulsive and innappropriate attack by that member was in no way indicative of any official position of organized sailing from the Barnegat Bay Yacht Racing Association. In recent years the BBYRA and the NJPPC have enjoyed cordial and respectful relations that have ONLY furthered the enjoyment of both power boaters and sailors on our mutual waters. The BBYRA is pledged to continue the pursuit of mutual respect between our two organizations specifically and members of the power boat and sailing community in general.

We at the BBYRA wish you and the members of the overall boating community on Barnegat Bay a continued summer of enjoyment.

With best regards,
Bob Morrow
Commodore/BBYRA

************************************************** ***********
Dave,

I echo Bob's comments and trust that one person's unfortunate comments do not reflect poorly on the sailing community.

Please know that I, too, believe the troopers need more help. The mutual respect and cooperation between our organizations is just one way in which we can make their jobs easier. My wish is for all boaters, be they power or sailors, enjoy the water and return safely to shore.

On a lighter note, the summer days are getting shorter, back to school plans are already starting and labor day is just around the corner. Here's hoping that the rest of the summer is safe and enjoyable for everyone in both our organizations.

Stay in touch.

Regards,
Rich Proko
Vice Commodore/BBYRA

Yeah, just saw those posts. Not a very good representation of the performance boat enthusiasts in general, but it looks like some people are dead set in their opinion. I find that poeple automatically think just because your boat is loud that it must be going fast. Loud does not always equal fast. Some people will just never understand. :mad: