ROCKY POINT — Mike McVay just wants to stroll from his house across Saratoga Road down to the beach in his community near Baby Island without causing a ruckus.

He wants others on Whidbey to be able to do the same in their neighborhoods, and for kayakers and canoeists to be able launch and to put into shore without impinging on private property, “and without getting yelled at.”

But that sort of public beach access is becoming more difficult to find as the island’s hundreds of miles of shoreline become more and more populated by private development.

“I don’t have beach access,” said McVay, whose house is about a half-mile upland from the sand and sea. “If the water keeps rising and the bluff keeps falling, I may have it one day, but I won’t be around for it.”

He does have beach access a short walk away, however — guaranteed on county maps showing public pathways and road ends. But such access is not easy to find, thanks to official neglect or deliberate attempts by some owners of beach property to disguise the routes and discourage their use.

McVay’s mission is to identify those public access points, and to get them clearly marked.

“There’s a lot of beach out there, and a lot of access to it,” McVay said Monday. “We hope to be able to arrive at a peaceful solution.

“But common sense seems to go out the door when people start talking about it,” he added.

McVay said he’s been working on locating public beach access points for about four years, since the day he learned that one of those points was right across the road from his house. It led to 200 feet of public beach.

“That got me kind of curious about how many others are around,” he said.

Since then, McVay said, he and others of like mind have determined that there may be more than 100 public beach access routes on the island, although not all are passable or lead to desirable destinations.

Some end at high bluffs impassible to the beach; others end in mudflats, he said.

“You have to go out and see for yourself,” McVay said. “That’s the only way you can tell.”

McVay said his group of beach walkers, boaters, fishers, clamdiggers and other interested people has grown to as many as 400, with a mailing list of more than a thousand. He said as many as 30 are heavily into research for the cause, and that for him it has become “almost a full-time job.”

“The goal is to identify and mark with signage every public beach access on the island,” he said. “We want to get everybody working on something that will last.”

McVay said another goal is to follow the examples of Bainbridge and Mercer islands, which have clearly identified their public access points and have committees that monitor them.

McVay said Whidbey is rife with examples of private property owners who have co-opted neglected public road ends and pathways and made them look like parts of their own property, discouraging access and parking, sometimes through the display of misleading signs.

He said he knows of instances where beach users have been harassed and even threatened by property owners, even though the users were actually on public beaches.

McVay said that a prime example of the kind of public-private dispute than can arise over beach access is Wonn Road near Greenbank.

The end of Wonn Road had been used for years by boaters and beach-goers, until the new owner of an adjacent parcel built a low wall restricting access, igniting a legal argument that has still to be resolved by the county.

McVay agreed that private property owners “have some valid concerns” when they worry about trespassers, hordes of people fishing, loud parties and mountains of trash.

“Consistently, that’s the attitude people have — that it could happen,” he said.

But he said those concerns aren’t relevant to the little areas of public beach at the ends of county roads and pathways.

“Those beaches aren’t going to be overused,” he said. “There’s just no room.”

McVay also wants to reassure property owners that according to state law, they have no liability if someone gets hurt on their beaches.

“They can’t sue you,” he said.

McVay said his group’s immediate goal is to identify the forgotten access points, to have signs erected that can be read both from inland and from the water, and to try to get the county to maintain the property.

He also hopes to publish a guidebook showing all of Whidbey’s public beach access points.

McVay acknowledges that the county is short of funds, and said his group is willing to organize a fundraising mechanism.

“That’s what it takes to do this kind of work — people volunteering to do things,” McVay said.

Helen Price Johnson, county commissioner for the South End, called beach access “a precious resource for all county residents.”

She said the county, through its shorelines management process, will be mapping public beach entry points in more detail.

She said a well-attended meeting organized by McVay in December in Bayview resulted in clearer communication between parties, and some creative ideas. One might be the creation of an Adopt an Access program similar to those for parks and highways, she said.

She said budget constraints and staffing limits — the county has only one person in charge of beach access on Whidbey and one on Camano — restrict what the county can do.

“It’s just not an option we have,” Price Johnson said Monday.

Meanwhile, McVay’s organization has adopted a new name — Islanders for Public Beach Access —- which McVay hopes will generate a non-confrontational response from property owners and others.

“We tried to come up with a name that was non-threatening, and would cover all the bases,” he said.

At least McVay hopes the name will be less confrontational than his previous one — Beach Posse.

“That sounded more like a lynch mob,” he said. “There’s no point in losing the battle before you start.”

McVay, 72, a member of a prominent woodcarver family on the island, has lived on Whidbey since 1973, the past 10 or so years near Baby Island.

He said his goal is to guarantee public beach use by as many islanders as possible.

“It works two ways,” McVay said. “If you’re going to have respect for private property, private property owners have to have respect for public property.”

“I want the hostility and defensive posture of private landowners to go away,” he added. “Once you have that, you have a lot going for you.”