By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

You can still spend a quiet afternoon sailing on Lake Horton in southeast Fayette, but you can't put your boat in at the Antioch Road boat ramp.

Temporarily.

A boater putting in at the ramp recently was shocked to find that... well, he was shocked, said county attorney Bill McNally. "We had a report of a person putting a sailboat in and being shocked at the boat ramp," McNally told the Board of Commissioners Thursday.

The commissioners enacted a temporary ban on sailboats at the ramp, though the boats can put in elsewhere if they like.

County manager Billy Beckett said Georgia Power Company has high voltage lines that go across the lake near the ramp, and the boat's 18-foot mast apparently picked up a static shock from the lines. "That's supposedly not dangerous," though it is uncomfortable, he said, but the county isn't taking any chances.

During construction of the lake, Georgia Power agreed to design its lines to prevent any such problem, Beckett said.

The county will ask the company to "go out there with appropriate analytical equipment to measure, and if there is a problem to correct the problem," he said.

Once the problem is corrected the ban will be lifted, he said. The ban applies only to sailboats, he said, because it is the height of the metal mast that causes the problem.

Boaters who want to put in elsewhere also might run into problems as they sail under the power lines, but boats big enough to have a problem probably can't get into the water without a ramp, he said.