Red tide, blue-green algae and a growing population can all harm the waterways that Adam Botana’s business depends on. But the vice president of Bay Water Boat Club isn’t waiting for others to help improve this environment. Instead he is at the helm of plans to take care of the back bays of Bonita Springs and Estero.
Morgan Hornsby
Adam Botana and his father Omar at is the Bay Water Boat Rentals.
Adam recently donated $12,000 to pay for signs that will mark seagrass beds in Estero Bay as zones where no boats with engines can travel. The state had designated these zones for no motors many years ago, but never funded the signage. The Tamiami Sportsman’s Coalition, a group of six local boat captains, held fundraisers to help, but never attained enough money.
“Tamiami Sportsman brought it to our attention that these permits are out there; they just need to be funded,” Adam says. “The Keys have a no motor zone by their seagrass. I don’t understand why we don’t have it. We’ve got to protect our areas. We just decided it would be a good thing for us to do. It is a good thing for the waterway. We have to protect what is left.”
Billy Norris, one of the founders of Tamiami Sportsman, is grateful for Adam’s help.
“It’s huge because it is difficult to raise money,” Billy says. “By next season these grass beds will be protected. It’s pretty awesome.”
That is just the beginning of Adam’s quest to protect the back bays. In January he started free weekly educational tours of the local waterways in south Lee County. Anyone can take the free one-and-a-half-hour tour where Adam explains not only boating safety in these shallow areas, but how to protect the ecology.
“It takes 10 to 15 years for that grass to regrow,” Adam says on a recent tour as he stops by a seagrass bed to educate those on board. “That is what we want to protect. If you cast a net, you will see how much is in that grass. There are baby sea horses, little grouper, starfish. This is where all the baby fish start. There is so much in there. It is mind-boggling. That is why we want to protect this.”
Adam hopes more people will attend these Friday morning free tours that he plans to do year-round.
“We invite anybody who wants to go out there and get familiar with the waterways,” he says. “We call it the local knowledge. A lot of times we go out there and I see people cutting across the bay, and they think they are in Lake Michigan or Lake Geneva. They are used to 80 feet of water.”
Andrea Stetson
Outside the channels, the water can be just inches deep. Those on the recent tour saw egrets and herons walking in the middle of the bay.
“We were just trying to help people figure out where to go,” he says of the tours. “It doesn’t cost us much. It just takes a little bit of our time.”
During the recent outing, Adam purposely left the channel and bumped bottom in a few inches of water.
“If you get stuck, don’t power through it,” he says as he demonstrates the best way to get off a sandbar. “This is a park. You need to treat it that way.”
Adam was recently appointed by the governor to the Florida Boating Advisory Council. He is one of 18 people around the state who work with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Department of Economic Opportunity regarding issues that affect the boating community.
“We go up there and discuss our big concerns,” Adam says.
Adam has also helped the fun side of boating. When the Bonita Springs Area Chamber of Commerce decided to stop running the annual boat parade on the Imperial River, Adam stepped in. When he took over in 2008, he was put at the forefront of a parade that had dwindled to about six boats the previous year.
“That was horrible,” Adam says. “I thought ‘We can do it,’ and it just kind of grew. Like anything else here at Bay Water, we push it to the extreme. We put some money in the pot and added some new themes and new ideas, and we put money into decorating our boats.”
Since then the parade has grown in participation each year and had more than 40 boats in the event last December.
“We are building it back up,” Adam says. “We are one of the biggest in Southwest Florida now. We are going to keep growing the best we can. We look forward to it every year. Anything we can do to help people in the water and bring attention to the water is a big thing.”
Adam was born in Naples and raised in Bonita Springs. He and his brother Derrick and their parents, Omar and Sherry Botana, began Bay Water Boat Rentals 14 years ago. They started Bay Water Boat Club 12 years ago. The club now has 397 members and 41 vessels, and there are an additional 15 rental boats.
With being so water-dependent, Adam says red tide did hurt his business this past year.
“We are down 20 percent on new membership sales,” he says. “Rentals slowed down in the summer and in the winter came back. But for the big investment, people are scared to put down the money for a boat or a membership. Red tide is a natural occurrence. It’s nature. It bounces back.”