Pennsylvania has more than 85,000 miles of rivers and streams and about 4,000 lakes. The state has now put in writing that getting to the water is harder than it ought to be.
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources released the Pennsylvania Fishing and Boating Access Strategy this month. It is not a construction program. It is a blueprint written for the outfits that actually build access: municipalities, watershed associations, heritage areas, land trusts and county parks departments.
The document sorts what keeps people off the water into physical, financial, social and psychological barriers, then lays out what fixes them. Boat launches. Walk-in fishing trails. Accessible parking and pathways. Adaptive launching docks that let somebody in a wheelchair get into a kayak without help.
“This strategy recognizes those obstacles and offers solutions for overcoming them,” said Mark Sweppenhiser, director of the commission’s Bureau of Boating.
DCNR Secretary Cindy Adams Dunn pointed to the state’s 2025-2029 outdoor recreation plan, which recorded the highest interest in kayaking and canoeing the survey has seen. More people want to paddle than there are good places to put in.
Two grant programs go with the strategy: the commission’s Boating Facility Grant Program and DCNR’s Community Conservation Partnerships Program. The strategy and its planning tools are posted at fishandboat.com.
Nobody from Harrisburg is going to show up with a backhoe. But the state has now written down what it is willing to pay for, which is the part local groups usually have to guess at.
