On Feb 20, 9:59?am, wrote:
On 20 Feb 2007 04:47:50 -0800, "Keith"
wrote:

There is a guy there that routinely hassles transiting boaters with no
FL registration. Never mind that you can pass through FL without FL
numbers, he will give you a ticket anyway. Here are some comments and
people to write if this concerns you.

Did you have out of state ID? If you dropped a Florida DL on him I can
see his point.
In the end all of this licensing and registration is about tax money.



Good point about the primary ID. Hadn't considered that might be the
case. Pretty tough to convice a cop that while you're a FLA resident
your privately owned boat isn't. I think that if the hairs got split
down to micro-fine, while enroute to a launch the boat is simply cargo
on a trailer- and most states will require some sort of licensing or
registration information for a trailer. Absent any current tabs on the
trailer, that might create "probable cause" for investigating the
ownership of the boat.

It's too bad that states enforce their tax and registration laws so
arbitrarily.
I can point to a couple of dozen very large and expensive boats in the
local area with Oregon registrations, even though the boats never
leave Puget Sound and have never been near the state of Oregon. Nor do
the owners maintain a residence in Oregon. (about 9% sales tax in
Washington, none in Oregon). While the state is losing some big dough
from people who are willing to lie to evade sales taxes on sometimes
multi-million dollar boat purchases, they just threw the book as some
poor schmuck for $6,000 in tobacco taxes because he was ordering
cigarettes from some out of state tribe. Don't know what he makes, but
according the news it's going to take him 18 months to pay this off if
the state garnishes 20% of his wages so I guess it's about $1600 a
month. I have always advocated registering a boat according to the law
and in the primary state of residence.