Consider the following four portraits of the jet ski in Monterey County waters:

• A jet ski tows a surfer into a 50-foot wave at Ghost Tree, the mysto-death wave off Pescadero Point in Pebble Beach.

• A lifeguard launches a jet ski off Carmel Beach and broncos out through the dangerous surf to save a drowning girl.

• Santa Cruz pro surfers whip each other into three-foot waves off Del Monte Beach and launch outrageous airs while photographers with hummingbird shutter speeds shoot for gaudy surf magazine ads.

• Two teams of industry wakeboarders learn to surf by towing each other into 10-foot waves at Moss Landing, narrowly avoiding disastrous collisions with each other, frightening local marine mammals and pissing off local surfers.

No issue underlines the difficulty of regulating ocean activity in the Monterey Bay Sanctuary than the use of PWCs (jet skis are officially referred to as personal watercraft, or PWCs). At last weekend’s statewide conference of the California Surfrider Chapters in Monterey, the PWC debate continued to polarize and confuse members of the surf-oriented environmental organization, prompting local chapter head Ximena Waissbluth to organize a panel of experts to come together the following Monday to address the facts.

“The Sanctuary will be unveiling their new PWC regulations in the spring,” Waissbluth says, “then there’s going to be two months of public comment. So I wanted to get a sense of how our chapter membership feels. The San Mateo chapter has a fairly strong stance against PWC use and is essentially asking all Central Coast chapters to show a united front. Before we do that, we wanted to find out more information.”

Events at the Surfrider meeting on Monday, Nov. 7, illustrated precisely why the surfing community has been incapable of addressing the data and coming to any sort of agreement on PWCs in the Sanctuary.

A dispute that broke out in the audience between well-respected but hot-headed local Brent Bispo and equally respected and hot-headed Santa Cruz pro Ken “Skindog” Collins turned into a shouting match. The fight illustrated the fact that, to surfers, the issue may have very little to do with PWCs and more to do with territoriality, localism, and media exploitation.

A vocal contingent of local surfers resent the media attention that towsurfing has brought to Monterey. It’s a story as old as surfing. Waves are a limited resource and some Monterey County surfers see jet skis and the people who use them as a threat to their local breaks.

Fueled by testosterone and a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, Bispo and Collins’ eruption was a perfect example of how towsurfing has polarized an already dysfunctional family. Local surfers have found themselves at the heart of the debate ever since local pros began using PWCs to tow into previously uncatchably large waves at Maverick’s, the infamous big wave off Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay.

Over the ensuing five years, the tow-surf movement simply blew up beyond all reasonable expectations. Fueled by a rash of surf movies, television programs and even American Express commercials featuring pornographically lustrous images of surfers wrapped in gargantuan blue barrels, the sport has become big business, and launched literally thousands of PWCs.

Billabong, the Irvine, Calif.-based Fortune 500 surfware company, upped the ante when they began offering a bounty on the biggest wave of each season, paying $1,000 a foot. Last March, Carmel surfer Don Curry was towed into a 60-plus foot wave off Pebble Beach that was a finalist for the award.

But most damaging to the image of PWCs is the new sport of “tow-at” surfing, where aerialist surfers are towed onto small waves at 30mph to launch looping tricks high above the water before splashing down.

Doug Kasunich, a 53-year-old surfer who’s watched PWCs transform his beloved Moss Landing into a dangerous, aquatic rodeo in recent years, has found himself at the center of the controversy.

“Moss Landing is the nursery school for towsurfing,” Kasunich says. “You’ll have these really inexperienced teams, wakeboarders for Christ’s sake, letting go of the rope and immediately falling down the face because they’ve never learned to surf. They drive all of the paddle surfers down to one peak to get away from them. It’s incredibly dangerous. It can’t keep on the way it is.”

And despite towsurfers’ protests to the contrary, Kasunich says, the jet skis are disturbing the local wildlife.

“On days when there are no skis, I surf with dolphins, otters, harbor seals. When you have five or six jet ski crews tearing the place up, there won’t be an animal in sight,” he says. “Just two weeks ago I was with eight harbor seals cornered by jet skis on the inside. I have to assume there’s a connection.”

Ed Larenas, the San Mateo Surfrider Chapter chair, points to “a huge amount” of data and court cases proving that PWCs’ detrimental effect on marine wildlife.

“The Sanctuary was taken to court by the PWC industry, and the industry lost,” Larenas says. “The same scenario has played itself out in the San Juans [off Washington State] and Marin. The ban has been upheld because of a substantial amount of data.”

Nonetheless, to date, no targeted scientific research has occurred within the Sanctuary on environmental impacts of PWCs.