WINTHROP — A day of boating and fishing on Cobbossee Lake for Darren and Melissa Moore was cut short early Saturday afternoon.

The couple from Bowdoinham had joined dozens of other boaters on the lake west of Augusta on the weekend before the upcoming Fourth of July holiday weekend.

One of those other boaters was Game Warden Steve Allarie, who works the Augusta district for the Maine Warden Service. Allarie was out on the water as part of Operation Dry Water, a three-day national awareness campaign on the dangers of boating under the influence.

Drinking isn’t the only infraction that wardens were looking for over the course of the weekend. As it happens, Darren Moore had bought the boat recently, and while he had life jackets and other required safety equipment on board, it lacked a registration sticker.

“The guy I bought it from said the registration was OK,” Moore said. Moore said he’d last owned a boat about 20 years ago, and he was getting acquainted again with boating rules and regulations.

“I believe you,” Allarie said. But in the case of a private boat sale, he said, the new owner must register the boat. He ordered the Moores back to shore with a warning to get the registration of the boat and its trailer straightened out.

The boating season in central Maine is short, and July tends to be the busiest enforcement month. It seems to hit a peak shortly after schools let out for the year. The boaters Allarie routinely encounters range from the inexperienced weekend boater to the experienced fishermen who are out regularly. Typically, he could make 15 to 20 stops a day for safety checks. That doesn’t include checking fishermen for licenses and legal catches.

Across Maine, about half the boating fatalities and third of highway deaths are attributed to alcohol. Maine Warden Service spokesman John MacDonald said in the last five years, the Warden Service has investigated an average of three fatal boat crashes per year. Most boaters comply with the wardens, Allarie said. And while alcohol is everywhere, he said people tend to be more responsible than not. Sometimes, though, the combination of hot sun and alcohol can create problems, he said.

Allarie said he does a lot of education and outreach on the water, making sure that each person in a boat has a life jacket, that there’s a throwable flotation device on boats longer than 16 feet, that watercraft with engines have fire extinguishers, and that each watercraft has some sort of device for making noise — a horn or a whistle, for instance.

“I’m looking for voluntary compliance,” he said. “When it comes to safety, we have to take it seriously.”

Another routine stop showed that Kris Martin, who was out on his boat with Michael Hatch, didn’t have a fire extinguisher aboard, nor did he have a registration. He said he had renewed his registration in April online using a Kindle Fire tablet, so there was no way to print out the acknowledgment. Generally, registrations come by mail within 30 days. “I’ve been checking my mailbox every day,” the Turner resident said.

“You can’t be out without a fire extinguisher,” Allarie said. “I can give you a summons or order you off the water. Seriously, if you have any fire, you have nothing to put it out with.”

“I’m out of here then, I guess,” Martin said.

“That’s as nice as I can be,” Allarie said.

Jessica Lowell — 621-5632

jlowell@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @JLowellKJ

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