SAN DIEGO—Consuming alcohol is illegal on this city's famous beaches. But, thanks to a loophole authorities are now trying to close, drinking a few feet from shore is not. 
 
 That's why, this past Saturday afternoon, Jon Kraemer sat atop an inflated air mattress, sipping a Bud Light he pulled from a floating cooler. 
 
 The 26-year-old pharmaceutical salesman was tipsy and carefree and dangling his feet in the water, despite the dozen police officers standing on shore making sure no booze was consumed on land. 
 
 Floatopia -- A Utopia? View Slideshow Sandy Huffaker for The Wall Street Journal Beachgoers on rafts clogged the water off of one San Diego beach July 17. 
 
 "This is the best day ever, that's all I have to say," said Mr. Kraemer. 
 
 San Diego's float parties are a case study in the law of unintended consequences. Fed up with litter and drunkenness on its beaches, San Diego's city council in 2007 passed a one-year ban on beach drinking. Voters made the ban permanent a year later. But there was an oversight: The ban defines "beach" as "the sand or land area bordering the water of an ocean or bay." The wording inadvertently created a drinkers' haven in the water. 
 
 Dozens of large and small drinking-and-floating events have been held since mid-2008. Many of them, including last weekend's, are organized anonymously through Facebook, the social networking site. 
 
 Police say that when the parties started, they checked with the city attorney's office about whether they were legal. It concluded that, indeed, drinking in the water isn't the same thing as drinking on the beach. "If you're floating, you're good," says Chris Ball, captain of the San Diego police department's northern division. 
 
 But the days of boozy float parties—dubbed "Floatopia"—may soon be over. The council's public safety and neighborhood services committee recently passed a proposal to amend the drinking ban so it extends to "bathers," a category that includes almost anyone not in some sort of boat, including kayaks and canoes. On Monday, the full council is expected to vote on making it "unlawful for any bather to consume any alcoholic beverage within one marine league of any beach." A league is about three-and-a-half miles. 
 
 "Now we have to take [the alcohol ban] a step further," says Tony Manolatos, a spokesman for city councilman Kevin Faulconer, who represents several of San Diego's beach communities, including Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach. 
 
 San Diego isn't the first beach community to grapple with Floatopia, though the city's parties are unique in that they were created purely to dodge the law. Santa Barbara County, which had been dealing with float parties since 2005, last year banned alcohol on Isla Vista beach and 100 yards into the water. 
 
 San Diego's parties are held in small bays that extend inland, rather than the city's miles of oceanfront. In the bays, calm waters and the absence of waves facilitate Floatopia drinking. Most floaters congregate right off land in water just a few feet deep. 
 
 The largest Floatopias have attracted roughly 3,000 floaters, many of whom drink way too much. As the day wears on, beaches fill up with trash, beer cans and weary drinkers napping on slowly deflating rafts. 
 
 Extra police and lifeguards cost the city tens of thousands of dollars. 
 
 "If you slip off and the first deep breath you take is seawater, chances are you're not coming back up," says Capt. Ball. "That's what we're concerned about." Nobody has drowned so far. 
 
 Most of San Diego's Floatopias happen in and around Pacific Beach—known as P.B.—a young, raucous neighborhood of bungalows and a two-mile-long strip of bars that ends at the Pacific Ocean. Back when beach drinking was still allowed, P.B.'s Fourth of July celebrations had so many alcohol-related arrests that police brought in a recreational vehicle outfitted with temporary jail cells. 
 
 The alcohol ban has calmed things down. On July 4, the mobile jail got little use and won't be returning next year, Capt. Ball says. "The beaches are just tranquil now," says Jerry Hall, a Pacific Beach resident who favored the alcohol ban. 
 
 The water, however, is a different story. Booze abounded at last weekend's Floatopia. Floats ranged from a barely buoyant blow-up doll to an inflatable deck that hosted a small dance party. Floating tables made possible games of "beer pong," a drinking game in which players toss ping-pong balls across a table hoping to dunk them in opposing cups. 
 
 Kim Rampaul, 24, came with a two-seater float that has dual cup-holders and a built-in cooler. Mr. Rampaul, a college student and Floatopia veteran, was lathered in sunblock and brought along beer, snacks and Gatorade. Like most floaters, Mr. Rampaul uses rope to tie his float to friends' floats, creating a bobbing lounge. 
 
 "It's just fun that we're allowed to do this," he says. "It's like you can't touch us, we're in the water." 
 
 San Diego's Floatopias have murky origins. One of the first people to publicize the loophole was Bradford Boyle, then an information technology engineer, in mid-2008. Mr. Boyle, 28, had been told that drinking in the water was a way of dodging San Diego's now-defunct rules prohibiting drinking on the beach before noon. Later, when the broader alcohol ban was passed, Mr. Boyle figured the same logic could be used to legally drink near but not on the beach. 
 
 After confirming the loophole with police and lifeguards, he shared the discovery on a personal website, and the idea spread. Mr. Boyle is now pursuing an M.B.A. degree and says he isn't organizing Floatopias any more. "It's just gotten out of control," he says. 
 
 Perhaps surprisingly, that view is shared by a number of Floatopia participants. Mr. Rampaul, for instance, says that despite his love of drinking and floating, parties have gotten so big, the city council had to extend the alcohol ban into water. 
 
 "Unfortunately, it makes sense," said Mr. Rampaul last weekend just before hopping on his float and enjoying a few beers. "Floating? Drinking? That's just not going to work out." 
 
 Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com ||||| The San Diego City Council on Monday voted unanimously to ban drinking on Mission Bay in an effort to stop the "floatopia" booze parties that have exploited a loophole in the city's ban on drinking on beaches. 
 
 Police and lifeguard officials told the council that the "floatopia" parties, at which hundreds of college-age people drink while floating on rafts, inner-tubes and other devices, are a menace and could lead to drownings because of drunkenness and injuries from broken bottles. 
 
 But opponents of the ban said that further limitations on drinking could hurt tourism. The council was not swayed by that argument. 
 
 "This is not the San Diego City Council saying no-no-no to things," said Councilwoman Marti Emerald. "This is the San Diego City Council trying to keep people alive at our beaches." 
 
 After an alcohol-fueled riot on the beach at Pacific Beach during Labor Day weekend 2008, the council voted to impose a one-year ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches. In November of that year, city voters approved a measure to make the ban permanent. 
 
 But the ban did not cover drinking in the water. Monday's ban on drinking in the water is set to become effective immediately. The ban does not include drinking on boats. 
 
 -- Tony Perry in San Diego 
 
 Photo: "Floatopia" party on Mission Bay. Credit: Nelvin Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune ||||| It took lifeguards all day to tow Wally, a dead humpback whale, just 11 miles out to sea. South winds brought the carcass back close to shore Monday, and it has returned despite repeated attempts to tow it out to sea. (Courtesy of Mark Girardeau and Mike Mongold, Newport Landing Whale Watching) 
 
 They’ve been blown up and cut to pieces, buried on beaches and dumped miles out at sea — but there’s still no foolproof way to get rid of a dead whale. 
 
 Witness Wally. 
 
 For the past two weeks, Los Angeles and Orange County officials have towed the 45-foot-long dead humpback out to sea — again and again and again. 
 
 But the female whale with the inappropriate name has refused her watery grave. 
 
 Since she initially washed up on Dockweiler State Beach near Los Angeles International Airport on July 1, Wally has bobbed farther and farther south, coming close to the shore off San Pedro, then Newport Beach, and later Dana Point, before most recently being towed away from San Clemente. Each time, lifeguards tugged Wally back out to sea in the hope that she would decompose naturally away from the beach. 
 
 ‘Crazy situation’ 
 
 “This is kind of a crazy situation in that it keeps coming back,” said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for California with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 
 
 Ideally, NOAA prefers to let a whale decompose on the beach, he said, but that wasn’t an option with Wally, who washed up days before the Fourth of July and about 100 yards from an RV park. 
 
 Since then, a convergence of problems have made Wally particularly difficult to dispose of, including that she had never been towed out far enough to keep winds and currents from drawing her bloated body back to the shore, Greenman said. 
 
 Before Wally was dragged out the first time, NOAA put together a float model, taking into account currents and winds to determine how far offshore the whale needed to be deposited to keep her from making a second shoreline appearance, Greenman said. 
 
 According to the NOAA model, Wally should have been towed about 30 miles offshore, he said. 
 
 Not enough fuel 
 
 Instead, she was tugged roughly 15 miles off the beach at Dockweiler, said county lifeguard Capt. Kenichi Haskett. It came down to the simple fact that none of the county lifeguard vessels were large enough to tow the whale the full 30 miles and retain enough fuel to make the return journey, Haskett said. 
 
 Not surprisingly, the challenge of disposing of a dead cetacean is its size. That was the problem for the Los Angeles County lifeguards who towed the 35- to 40-ton whale from her initial landing spot at Dockweiler after they waited for high tide to pull her back in the ocean, he said. 
 
 “It was something that was extremely strenuous to remove,” Haskett said. 
 
 Even the roughly 15-mile trip took the lifeguard vessel nearly five hours, he said. L.A. County lifeguards are prepared for their day-to-day work assisting vessels and making rescues, he said, but towing a whale isn’t something the agency is prepared for, he said. 
 
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 Whale like a sail 
 
 Unfortunately, scientists did not have time to perform a full necropsy of Wally. When she was pulled off the beach, the whale was still largely intact, which allowed gases to build up inside Wally and keep her floating for longer than if researchers had been able to make more cuts, Greenman said. 
 
 “Generally, when given the chance to do a full necropsy — when I get a chance to fully open (a whale) up and everything — it does not float as long,” he said. 
 
 Without an initial necropsy, the gases that built up inside Wally turned the whale into a sail, Greenman said, making it even easier for the animal’s corpse to be pushed by winds and currents back toward the shore. 
 
 “Obviously, it works better when the animal can be opened up and degassed,” he said. 
 
 Greenman added that it’s still not clear what killed Wally, but researchers have taken samples and are testing for biotoxins. Those test results should come back in about a month, he said. 
 
 Recurring problem 
 
 Generally, disposing of dead whales has posed a challenge wherever they have landed. In one instance in 1970, an Oregon town attempted to blast away a dead whale with dynamite, nearly destroying an Oldsmobile as chunks of the mammal rained down onto onlookers. 
 
 Haskett said a pyrotechnic solution was suggested to get rid of Wally’s carcass, but lifeguards chose to tow her out instead. 
 
 More recently, a dead, 40,000-pound Fin whale washed up on a Malibu beach in 2012, leading to an interagency kerfuffle as state, county and local officials tried to foist onto each other the responsibility for removing the malodorous carcass from the affluent coastal area. Eventually the corpse was towed away from the beach several days after it washed ashore. 
 
 Earlier this year, when a gray whale washed up near the popular Trestles surfing spot at San Onofre State Beach, officials opted to cut up and haul the whale away on trucks after ruling out towing it to sea or burying it. 
 
 Dead whales are fairly common, Greenman said. In the past week, he’s heard of two whale carcasses floating near the Channel Islands. What isn’t common is having one corpse floating back to shore again and again and again and again, he said.
– San Diego's city council has closed a loophole that allowed partygoers to dodge a ban on drinking on the beach by boozing just offshore instead. Wording in the original ban defined beach as land only, leading to "Floatopia" parties which saw thousands of people drinking on rafts and inner tubes just a few feet offshore, the Los Angeles Times reports. The updated law now says "bathers" need to be one marine league—around 3.5 miles—offshore before they can drink alcohol. City leaders say the floating parties were a disaster waiting to happen, and even partygoers say the law probably isn't such a bad idea. "Unfortunately, it makes sense," a college student taking to his air mattress for a final few beers told the Wall Street Journal. "Floating? Drinking? That's just not going to work out."