Boaters Demand North Sea Harbor Dredging

Some 2 million years ago, the receding glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch gave Long Island’s South Shore its sandy beaches.

Fast-forward to 2022, and the winter’s nor’easter storms gave way too much sand to North Sea Harbor. Shoaling has rendered the inlet and harbor nearly impassible, except at peak high tide.

Stuck high and dry away from beloved berths, boaters are urging officials to dredge the waterway to make it navigable.

The locale is a priority on the Suffolk County dredge list, said Town Trustee President Scott Horowitz. Getting all the regulatory agencies and permitting involved completed involves a level of collaboration he said is ongoing.

Still, he said, getting the job completed in time for Memorial Day weekend would be “a very optimistic outlook.”

Last week, the moon tide shoaling practically closed the inlet entrance, forcing recreational boaters and commercial fishermen, as well as the bay constable, fire boat and pump-out boat, to find other, temporary lodgings.

The draft for boats sinks to just 1.5 feet at low tide, with just 3 feet the maximum at peak high tide. A boat’s draft is the distance between the waterline and the boat’s deepest point, also known as the minimum amount of water required to keep a boat’s hull from scraping the bottom.

“A sailboat got hung up last week, and people have run aground,” resident Bruce McGowan reported, noting that “hundreds and hundreds” of boaters use the inlet to Peconic Bay at Towd Point every summer. An experienced captain himself, he said one has to be very careful moving through the harbor and inlet channel, and using a depth finder is a must.

North Sea resident Jim Williams said he is intimately familiar with the harbor, too, having traversed its waters for more than 30 years. He docks at Southampton Town’s Conscience Point Marina and reported getting a message from Town Parks Director Kristin Doulos late last month urging dock tenants to monitor conditions very closely, as the shoaling and shallow water “may not be safe for boating.”

McGowan noted that nearby Strong’s Marina offers boats for rental, so not everyone wanting to sail local waters is knowledgeable about conditions and how to navigate them.

To the marina’s general manager, Jessica McCarthy, conditions are the worst she’s seen in 11 years at the helm of Strong’s Marine Southampton Peconic Bay. Beyond her customers, McCarthy said she also felt for homeowners across the water who can’t get in and out of the inlet.

A visit to the area on May 5 revealed few private docks with boats tied up; larger vessels simply can’t get in.

And those that are inside the harbor, McCarthy noted, can’t go out and come back. There isn’t time for a recreational steam across the bay to Greenport for lunch. Boaters wouldn’t be able to get back to their berths — the water becomes so shallow when the tide turns.

Stewards of Southampton’s shores, waterways and bay bottoms, the Town Trustees discussed the North Sea Harbor situation with coastal geologist Aram Terchunian of the Westhampton Beach firm First Coastal Corporation during a work session last month.

Trustee Edward Warner Jr. said North Sea Harbor is on the dredge priority list and made note that the amount of material that’s filled in the inside of the inlet is more than has been seen in many years. Trustee Bill Pell reported receiving “a tremendous amount of calls,” about the situation. Horowitz agreed. “My phone’s been blowing up,” he said.

Terchunian said that the dredge project last year placed material, known as spoils, about 1,500 feet west of the inlet, compared to the previous one that put spoils only 500 feet away. Sand from the earlier dredge went right back into the inlet and harbor. Moving it farther to the west took it out of the current that sucks the sand back into the inlet, he explained.

Warner said some people believe the western deposit brought the sand into the channel and harbor, but in most of the storms he’s seen, material flows northwest toward Robin’s Island.

The real problem now, Terchunian said, is a giant stockpile of excess material on the east side of the inlet. The beach there is 7 feet higher than normal, and wave action erodes the material and draws it into the channel, due to the imbalance of placement over the years. He said that, hopefully, with ensuing dredge projects placing spoils to the west, the imbalance will even out.

There’s an 88,000 cubic yard imbalance built up east of the inlet and that’s what’s being eroded into the channel, Terchunian said, adding that it could take 10 years to even out the imbalance.

“Everything is moving in the direction of a dredge,” Warner said.

And that “everything” puts a lot of chefs in the kitchen. The Trustees are the local boots on the ground — or in the sand — and make requests and recommendations to the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, which has the equipment and is in charge of dredging projects from Amityville to Montauk along the South Shore and from Huntington to Orient Point along the North Shore. The DPW has to coordinate with and get the green light from federal, state and local entities.

DPW officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It’s real alphabet soup,” Terchunian said of the permitting process. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers coordinates with National Marine Fisheries, plus the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, while the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation signs off on the state permit.

Normally, the dredging window runs from October to January in any given year in order to protect shellfish, fish and endangered waterfowl like piping plovers and the least tern. For this upcoming springtime dredge, a “time of year waiver” had to be procured, Terchunian explained.

This year, county officials were able to obtain an additional waiver from the feds, who had originally prohibited dredging until after June 1, due to the spawning of summer flounder.

A nesting pair of endangered piping plovers has been located about 600 meters away from the inlet, so, Horowitz explained, specific protocols must be in place to protect them.

“All this collaboration is going on behind the scenes,” he said. “We’re hoping they can all come to a decision sooner rather than later.”

Weather delays, equipment breakdowns and the amount of time it takes to mobilize equipment can draw a project out into an attenuated timeframe. Horowitz expects the project to take two to three weeks to complete, and “if everybody gets around the table, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to begin by mid-May.” He said it probably wouldn’t be finished until June.