[Winnipesaukee]

Finally some free time! As wild as Winni may be when it's crowded, I'll take a boat up there over a moped on the Vineyard anytime!!!


At the beginning of the month I sent an email to NHMP inquiring about the use of SSN numbers, and asked whether mine was transmitted over the air.

I got a very in-depth and informed response.

A few quotes from Lt. Tim Dunleavy's reply back (any my responses):

Mr. Winnipesaukee,

Thank you for your inquiry as to the circumstances of your contact with Marine Patrol Officer XXXX XXXX the evening of July 9, 2009. You raise several issues in your correspondence that I will address in this response. Furthermore, I will address several issues that you have also raised on the Winnipesaukee.com forum that I feel need clarification as well. Hopefully, you too, will see the need to post some of this information so that it will help clarify some of the misinformation being discussed.

As for your questions;
NH Marine Patrol does not have a policy on the use of a person’s Social Security (SS) number as a means of positively identifying a vessel’s operator. Law Enforcement officers throughout the country use this as one of the many ways of determining a person’s true identity. Some states have used the SS # as the person’s driver’s license number. Other states make the number available on their law enforcement data bases after collecting the number when the person was arrested. There are a variety of reasons why a state may have this information and, as a result, share it with other law enforcement agencies.

Marine Patrol Officers are trained to use the SS # as a secondary means of confirming the information a person provides them. In your specific case, MPO XXXX requested a print out of your Massachusetts registry information and indeed confirmed that your SS # was provided accurately. Interestingly, the address you provided him was not what the registry listed (this is the address you provided him verbally and indicate to us in your email that he “refused to hear”). Therefore, having given your SS # to the officer saved further inconvenience for you at a later date.

My SSN does indeed match my driver's license. The vessel was registered to a family member of a different address.

Regarding your SS# being broadcasted over the radio, Marine Patrol Officers are trained in the various privacy laws that exist in this state regarding personal information being accessed by the public. NH has very strict laws that regulate this information and policies are in place to protect it. Our officers are aware that SS # are used by identity thieves and do not transmit this information over the airwaves. (I have attached the two radio transmissions from MPO XXX notifying our headquarters of his stop with you and him clearing the stop.)

I would also like to take this opportunity to address some of the other issues you raised in your email and on the Winnipesakee.com forum. I will qualify my statement by saying (as many of the follow-up entries to your thread pointed out) that your version and the officer’s version are somewhat different. I have learned after 20+ years with Marine Patrol that the actual facts often lie somewhere in the middle of the two versions and that each person’s perception has become their reality. I also recognize that not every officer is going to have an identical approach to their enforcement of our various laws and their application of authority will differ from one to another. That being said, a goal of our training is to establish consistency in the enforcement of our laws and rules from one officer to another.

I would also like to take this opportunity to address some of the other issues you raised in your email and on the Winnipesakee.com forum. I will qualify my statement by saying (as many of the follow-up entries to your thread pointed out) that your version and the officer’s version are somewhat different. I have learned after 20+ years with Marine Patrol that the actual facts often lie somewhere in the middle of the two versions and that each person’s perception has become their reality. I also recognize that not every officer is going to have an identical approach to their enforcement of our various laws and their application of authority will differ from one to another. That being said, a goal of our training is to establish consistency in the enforcement of our laws and rules from one officer to another.

MPO XXXX stopped you after he observed you passing through the area of light #44, Pitchwood Island. He was in the light #2 no wake zone, Eagle Island. In his opinion, you were traveling greater than the allowable night-time speed of 25 mph. He brought his patrol boat up to speed and began to “pace” you with his boat’s GPS showing approximately 40 mph. It also took him the entire length of Governor’s Island before he was able to reach you. (Perhaps you didn’t see his lights, may have thought he was after another boat, etc. (I am not implying that you were running from the stop. MPO XXX does not believe you were trying to avoid him.) Ultimately you were stopped just west of light #28. MPO XXX couldn’t prove you were traveling 25+ mph, but certainly these facts as he perceives them, would lead to a level of articulable suspicion warranting a stop at 11:42 pm (according to our dispatch/radio log for that evening.)

This is interesting. Not once, but twice, the MPO told me he paced my boat, at 55mph (his speed) for 3 minutes. To do this, he would have covered almost 3 miles. Governor's Island is only, maybe, 2 statute miles long. Coming out of the NWZ at FL 2, this doesn't seem possible. I was also not pulled over "just west of FL 28" (Witches). I remember hugging the island and had just passed the black spar on the northeast side, and changed course to ESE, lining me up with the Witches channel. That was when I saw the blue lights abeam on my port side. I was maybe 1 statute mile from FL 28 when I was stopped...

I have attached three files for you to listen to. Two are the radio transmissions that MPO XXX made while making contact with you. You will hear that he stopped you at 2348 hours and cleared at 0008 hours. The third transmission is MPO XXX signing off for fuel at our headquarters at 0021 hours. This time was confirmed on video as well. At our 2330 hour officer safety check, MPO XXX advised our dispatch that he was near Moulton’s Cove in Paugus Bay. This was twenty minutes before he stopped you. My point is that MPO XXX was not with you for one hour, in fact, it was twenty minutes.

I can only hope this information helps to answer your questions, and allows you to help correct some of the misrepresentations you made on the forum. While you are free to vent your frustrations about the stop or the fact that you were asked for your SS #, I hope this sheds some light on the various issues our officers deal with on a daily basis.

I'm not certain about the length of time I was stopped for... It certainly felt longer. I did have a shivering passenger by the end of the stop, as we definitely stayed out longer than we intended to. Although it was nice to hear back from NHMP and get their point of view, I still feel I was inconvenienced for doing absolutely nothing unlawful and do not appreciate the officer's actions in pulling me over.

Oh yeah, and after the stop I rushed home for some hot cocoa.

Definitely lump me in with the "Anti-Winni-speed-limit" crowd. Especially 25mph at night.

I do wish there was a way for the MP to effectively defend itself when scrutinized and (arguably) bashed on a popular forum... This doesn't exactly seem fair.