By Anthony O. Miller
CYPRUS Marine Police yesterday began enforcing new rules restricting hours and sites for jet-ski operators to rent water-sports equipment on the beach, Cyprus Water Sports Association President George Demetriou told the Cyprus Mail.
Demetriou said members of his association would not obey Marine Police orders to move from their current locations to the margins of the beaches, or to limit their rental hours to the six hours per day allowed under the government’s new rules.
The rules move water-sports operators to the margins of the sandy swimming beaches, and limit their operation to 10am-1pm and 4pm-7pm slots. They are the government’s reaction to at least three ski-jet accidents last year that killed one British tourist and seriously injured three others.
“The marine police started today writing down the names of the people who have to move from the (current) corridors, so they can take them to court,” Demetriou said.
But he said the water-sports operators “are still in their (old) positions and they are working… inside this year’s swimming areas, which were last year’s (sea-access) corridors.”
“Whether the floats are there or not there, all the water sports people pretend there is a corridor there,” Demetriou said, adding: “Everybody knows about it and they are very careful,” not to run into swimmers.
“Our people will stay where they are. The legal advice from the union’s lawyers is that we’ve got the law with us 100 per cent,” he said.
As to the new operating hours, versus the old sunrise to sunset hours, Demetriou said: “We don’t agree to it. Nobody is going to work those hours. We are going to work as normal.”
“We still believe that doing something violent will not bring results,” he said. “We still believe that we don’t want to affect tourism, the chicken that lays the golden egg. We are going to go through the legal procedure… which means suing and lawyers and courts. (But) if they start giving tickets, it will be a different story,” he added.
Besides the backing of their union Povek (the Union of Small Businessmen and Retailers), the jet-ski operators yesterday got some mixed support from some of the island’s powerful hotel industry.
John Wood, President of the Cyprus Hotel Managers Association, said his 180 members opposed blanket rules moving all water-sports operators to beach margins and limiting their hours to six per day. He said this discriminated against operators and against hotels that advertised water-sports.
“The members basically want each case to be looked at on its merits,” he said, especially as “hotels that are on the sea throughout Cyprus promote water sports, and they do not want people to have to go a mile down the beach… to the next hotel and… lose their competitive edge.”
But, he added, “the jet-ski problem is a very serious one. Lives have been lost… (and) controls are needed. There’s no doubt about that… We cannot afford to have one more loss of life. That’s not negotiable.”
However, Wood said he was “not so certain” that lives were lost “because there are jet skis in front of hotels, rather than because the people who have been given the jet-skis either were not shown how to use them properly, or they were shown and they didn’t listen or ignored the instructions. Whether they had too much to drink is another story,” he added.
Aris Moussoulides, assistant general manager of STEK, the Association of Cyprus Tourism Enterprises, said his associations’ 29 four-and five-star hotels did not want the water-sports sea-access corridors moved, but did want only two hours per day of operation, from 10am to noon.
Moussoulides echoed Wood in noting that moving the rental sites and corridors from in front of some beach hotels gave others a comparative advantage, especially as many Cyprus hotels advertised water-sports in their package-tour brochures.
He also said confining more operators into fewer sea-access corridors would cause “congestion of the traffic… There will be some problems. If you have one corridor and you have five times the congestion, you can imaging the dangers.”
“Our suggestion was that they should leave (the sea-access corridors) as they were, and (instead) be very strict about whom they give a license to rent the jet-skis,” he said.
Zacharias Ioannides, director-general of the Cyprus Hotel Association, said the owners of the 450 hotels in his association had from the start backed changing both the hours of operation and the sites for rental of water- sports equipment.
“The top priority is for our tourists, our clients. They are the paramount importance… So this is why we are in favour of the regulations. We believe they are to the benefit no only of the tourists, but also of the good image of Cyprus as an attractive and safe destination for the holidays.”
