Harbourmaster Phil Wiel said he has been “very impressed” with most holiday makers on the waterways so far this summer.

Phil, who is the Queenstown Lakes District harbourmaster, spent most of New Year’s Day on the Mata-Au/Clutha River, where close to 200 people boated or floated from the Outlet to the Albert Town Bridge.

“I was very impressed with people on the river - most were wearing life jackets,” he said.

“I only had to turn around about a dozen people and half of those went away and got life jackets. There were only a handful of disgruntled people.”

Phil said while in general “people are pretty good” this summer, there have been paddle boarders not wearing life jackets and jet skis “going too fast and too close to shore”.

Harbourmaster Phil Wiel

He reminded people to follow the five rules of water safety: wear your life jacket; take two waterproof ways to call for help; check the forecast; avoid alcohol; and be a responsible skipper.

The harbourmaster is now based at the new Wānaka Marine Rescue Centre (MRC) at Eely Point, which Phil said makes sense as “it's a lot busier here than in Queenstown”.

“We've got two young fellows over here permanently during the busy time, plus myself,” he told the Wānaka App.

“We’re a team or three, but we're still looking at others and we've also got some ramp/launch staff as we did last year.”

The staff on duty liaise with the ramp staff (brought in for the summer peak only) who feed information back to HQ about activities at the launch ramps and duty staff feed information to the ramp staff as well. 

“And we've got all these cameras and things set up around the place and we've got monitoring here [the MRC], so we can quickly duck in here to check it all,” Phil said.

There’s a similar setup in Queenstown as well, but the high-tech monitoring and communications equipment now set up in the harbourmaster’s control office at the MRC is new to Wānaka.

“We're trying to educate people; so that you might not see things happening but they are happening as people feed that information back to us,” Phil said. 

He advises staff that their presence on the water is important, even if they’re not doing anything - just being seen out there is good.

“And don’t get into a confrontational situation with people, talk to people, approach them in a nice way and if they want to kick off, then back off; you've got a description and a registration.”

The harbourmaster has a boat and four jet skis to cover the district, with at least two in Wānaka on demand over the busy period.

As well as providing an educational and monitoring presence on Lake Wānaka, harbourmaster staff have been tasked with conducting a mooring survey.

The staff have also received council funding to conduct a safety review of ski lanes and ensure there are sufficient buoys in the lake’s major ski lanes; and have added new black and red ‘danger buoys’ on Stevenson's Arm and around various rocks.

PHOTOS: Wānaka App