Boat driver charged in SML wakeboarding crash

Conservation Officers with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries charge a man in connection with a boating accident that hurt a young wakeboarder at Smith Mountain Lake.

41-year-old Carlo Grove from Goodview is charged with driving too fast and too close to a dock at Smith Mountain Lake.  The charge is in relation to the “50 foot rule,“ meaning if you’re withing 50 feet of a dock, you have to be traveling at a no wake speed.

The incident caused a young wakeboarder to run head on into a boat dock last Saturday afternoon, on the Bedford County side of the lake.

Officers tell us the young boy is in stable condition at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.