After watercraft accidents, these San Diego businesses sued and helped curb illegal rentals. But is it enough?

SAN DIEGO — A lawsuit settlement and stepped-up city enforcement may be making Mission Bay safer by reducing the number of illegally rented boats and other devices, but critics are still calling for further action.

Popular rental app Getmyboat.com, which city officials have blamed for allowing rentals that come with no training or safety instructions, has agreed to start requiring renters to upload key documents to its site.

The new requirement has reduced the number of boats available to rent locally on Getmyboat.com by roughly 70%, according to Tom Feerick, an attorney who negotiated the settlement.

Feerick represents four brick-and-mortar boat rental companies operating on Mission Bay and San Diego Bay.

Those companies say Getmyboat.com and other apps have cost them millions in business while simultaneously making the bay much more dangerous.

The settlement comes in the wake of multiple high-profile injury incidents involving personal watercraft, which are also known commonly by the brand name Jet Ski.

Those incidents include the July 2023 death of a 12-year-old girl who was killed paddle-boarding in Mission Bay by an 18-year-old on a watercraft he rented on an app.

San Diego Lifeguard Chief James Gartland has called illegal rentals a top concern.

“People don’t know,” Gartland said just before the 12-year-old girl was killed. “They get on an app, they rent a vessel, they show up at a public boat launch, they get on it, and they go 70 miles an hour within 2 to 3 minutes.”

Gartland declined recent requests for an interview and for comment on the settlement, which was approved in late summer, including on whether it has reduced the number of illegal rentals on the bay.

Instead, a spokesperson for the Fire-Rescue Department shared statistics showing the results of stepped-up city enforcement.

Citations are on the rise since the Lifeguard Division announced a crackdown in November 2024, those data show.

Annual citations by city police and lifeguards dropped to 361 in 2024 — down from 454 in 2022 and 424 in 2023. But citations in 2025 hit 465 on Nov. 30, and they are on pace to surpass 500 by the end of the year.

The crackdown has included higher fines, easier-to-enforce rules and new requirements that licensed rental companies agree to pay damages in injury crashes.

Andy Kurtz, owner of Seaforth Boat Rentals on Mission Bay, one of the plaintiffs in the now-settled lawsuit, said the legal rental companies appreciate the city’s efforts to step up enforcement of illegal rentals.

Kurtz said safety has improved because of a combination of those efforts and the settlement he approved along with three other local companies: Mission Bay Sportcenter, Adventure Water Sports and Action Beach & Bay Rentals.

Illegal boat rentals are hard to enforce because transactions occur privately over apps, similar to how accommodations are booked on AirBnB, and then the two parties meet at a boat launch on the bay.

Feerick, the lawyer for the local brick-and-mortar businesses that sued, said one way to boost regulation is the settlement’s requirement that people offering boats for rent on Getmyboat.com upload key documents.

The main document they must upload is their authorization to operate on Mission Bay.

Such authorizations can’t be obtained unless a renter has liability insurance and agrees to indemnify the city against litigation damages and to give users safety training.

Before the settlement, Getmyboat.com was requiring those offering boats only to self-attest that they had complied with all of the requirements. Now they must upload proof within 60 days of listing their boat.

Kurtz said the requirement is making a difference but isn’t a perfect solution. “It doesn’t have a lot of teeth, but it will discourage some people,” he said.

He speculated that Getmyboat.com agreed to the settlement because it doesn’t come with any enforcement.

He said he and his fellow plaintiffs would have preferred to have a court rule that people can’t offer rentals on apps without prior eligibility verification. But he said the legal costs and risks of going to trial were too high.

Feerick said he unsuccessfully lobbied city officials to join the suit, which could have given it the financial legs to continue instead of ending in a settlement.

Because the city gets a percentage of each legal rental, he argued to officials that they had a strong incentive beyond improving safety on the bay.

“I went to the city and said, ‘You should join this lawsuit, because you’re losing your slice of the action,’” he said.

A spokesperson for City Attorney Heather Ferbert declined to comment on the city’s decision not to join the litigation.

A spokesperson for Getmyboat.com declined to comment on the settlement and directed any further questions to an attorney for Yanmar, its parent company.

The 12-year-old killed by a personal watercraft in 2023 was hit by Arsanyous Refat Ghaly, who pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to 230 days in custody and two years of probation.

The family of the 12-year-old, Savannah Peterson, has sued the city. No trial date has been scheduled in that case.

Last month, the city paid out $750,000 to a Naval Academy student from Rancho Santa Fe for injuries she suffered when a city lifeguard ran over her with a personal watercraft at La Jolla Cove in December 2023.