A B.C. couple will receive government compensation for the scenes of sex, sounds of swearing and smells of public defecation they've endured for years from hoards of bored young cherry-pickers hanging out by the river next door.

Scott and Caroline Mynott live along the Goat River outside of Creston, but the provincial ministry of transportation owns the right-of-way between their home and the water.

For at least eight summers now, crowds of migrant fruit-pickers -- mainly university students from Quebec -- have flocked to the Creston Valley to harvest cherries. On particularly hot days, the workers are given the day off, and as many as 180 of them have been known to gather beside the Mynotts' property to lounge at the riverside, nicknamed The Point.

"Ever since the influx of these workers, the Mynotts' summers have, from their perspective, been a plague of distressing nuisances," B.C. Supreme Court Justice Mark McEwan wrote in a Tuesday decision finding the ministry responsible for the disturbances.

"They complain of noise and foul language down at the beach. They have witnessed (and videotaped) episodes of public drinking and public nudity and indecency, including explicit sexual activity. They have gathered evidence suggesting drug use."

Garbage is left lying in the woods and on the riverbanks. At times, the Mynotts have returned home to find people in their yard -- or even sitting on their deck.

The partiers have been known to defecate in the water near the Mynotts' well, and the couple has had to put out abandoned campfires left burning during forest-fire season.

Simon Fraser University criminologist Brian Kinney acted as an expert witness during the trial, and suggested that the only way for Mounties to keep the workers under control would be to form a new police force dedicated exclusively to The Point.

In response to complaints from the Mynotts, the government placed a porta-potty on the site, put up signs regulating parking and added a dumpster.

"The users of the point have shown a marked disregard for these measures. The parking signs have been uprooted, and the portable toilet was upended. The dumpster simply appears to have added a new locus for obnoxious smells and litter without mitigating the mess on the beach," McEwan wrote.

The Cherry Growers' Association has also taken steps to control its workers, distributing a code of conduct to seasonal employees and enlisting volunteers to clean up The Point area.

But McEwan lambasted the government's response to the Mynotts' complaints and its defence against the couple's lawsuit.

"The defendant claims the right, as government, to limit itself to efforts it knows to be ineffectual, to declare them ‘reasonable,' and to permit the right-of-way to constitute a zone of lawless conduct," he wrote.

"It flatly submits that it is a valid exercise of public policy to allow public access to water on government held rights-of-way and to then take no interest when there is wholesale abuse of the privilege."

McEwan said that he would wait until another cherry-picking season had passed to determine how much the government should pay the Mynotts for their suffering.

"If an effective end has been put to the activities, it will then be possible to estimate the Mynotts' damages on a one-time basis," the judge wrote.

If not, the Mynotts may be eligible for a much larger payment, and the government could face a court order to clean up The Point.

McEwan said that, at least for now, it is entirely up to the ministry to decide how to solve the problem, but suggested that installing permanent toilets and involving the police more often might help.