Infringement of swimmers’ rights

The report titled Beaches And Boats Checked (July 3) is meant to reassure swimmers that they can now enjoy a “dip” in our newly-created swimming zones, safe in the knowledge that they will “not be disturbed by any passing sea traffic”.

This is putting it rather too daintily so that the real message gets a bit fuzzy in translation. First of all, most swimmers want more than a so-called “dip” in a confined zone. Secondly, “passing sea traffic” does more than “disturb”; passing power boat traffic can inflict something much nastier and more permanent, like death.

I, personally, was once nearly killed by a “throttle happy” speedboat while swimming quite close to shore in Ġnejna Bay. Some years ago, an Italian tourist met a gruesome end after he was minced by a power boat propeller a few metres offshore and, more recently, a swimmer was killed by a sea scooter in one of our bays.

But we live in a truly mad, mad world. The response to these tragedies and injuries and the huge increase on power boat ownership is to further encourage reckless behaviour by keeping swimmers in an enclosure while allowing boat owners all the space.

Malta has a population of 400,000, all of whom theoretically have a right to swim freely in our surrounding open sea. But, now, swimmers are being progressively restricted to so-called “safe zones”.

Added together, these “safe” zones would probably amount to a total area of about one square kilometre. Thus, if the entire population decided one day to swim “safely” all at once in these “safe zones”, the area of sea surface available to each swimmer would be about the size of an armchair.

If we now look at our privileged boat owners: while swimmers are restricted to these laughably small swimming zones (“for their own safety”), owners of power boats can freely roam the entire Mediterranean, an area of about 2.5 million square kilometres while those many swimmers who like to do healthy exercise by swimming longer distances are restricted to a small area bounded by buoys a mere 20 or so metres offshore.

Surely, something is wrong here!

While a swimmer is neither fast nor dangerous, boats can be both fast and dangerous to swimmers. Surely, therefore, it is the responsibility of those in control of a power boat to avoid endangering swimmers and not the other way around.

Is it too much to ask boat skippers to obey the rules and keep well away from the coast if going at speed when they have the entire Mediterranean at their disposal? Is it too much to ask skippers to behave responsibly by proceeding extremely slowly and keeping a careful lookout for swimmers when manoeuvring inside a bay?

This idea of expecting swimmers to swim in crowded pens like farmed tuna “for their own safety” so that power boats may move carelessly at speed close to shore or in bays is another no-brainer.

This is another typical case of the way things are seen from the wrong end in Malta because it provides the easiest solution.

Instead of taking steps to stop boats endangering swimmers by ensuring that they drive responsibly, the answer has been to herd swimmers into a small space and hand our bays and offshore seas over to boats.

Creation of such “safe” zones virtually gives power boats a licence to kill outside a zone. It shifts the responsibility for safety from being hit by a power boat on to the harmless swimmer who ventures outside the zone.

This is not only pure madness, it is fundamentally wrong.