Jefferson County Buoys

Dear Brian,
Just wanted to emphasize the warning and also to urge the powers-that-be to quickly get out and replace the buoys marking the rock pile noted by a previous post from RRSP's Ryan Peterson (His quote from Saturday 8/9/2008 states "The channel markers and the buoy marking the rock pile are missing. Adding to the problem is the water has become home to many rocks and logs. We have the side scanning sonar and could see many of these on the bottom. I also noticed the depth of the water quickly changes from 4' to 2' without warning. This area was known for the rock piles, sholes, submerged grasses, and junk. It now appears to be much worse.")

My family and I came up on this rock pile and did some pretty significant damage to our jet-boat. Luckily we don't have an external prop so there was no damage done to anything in that regard but we have some pretty deep scratches to our gelcoat and even three spots where the gelcoat was broken through to the underlying fiberglass. Other damage was done to the opening grate to the impellar but the motor seems to run OK and we made it back to the boat launch.

The points I wish to make is:
1. I want to urge whoever puts buoys out on the lake to get this done as soon as possible; minimally putting some temporary marker that denotes danger in certain areas. One of us could have been killed hitting this rockpile yesterday.
2. I want to urge boaters to be very careful out on Lake Koshkonong because of possible missing buoys that mark dangerous obstacles and because there may be various debris just under the surface in certain areas.

Sincerely,
Mark & Geri Rissman