WELLFLEET — It’s been so long since the mooring field in the harbor was dredged that those most familiar with the marina can only guess how many boats it might hold. The 24-acre mooring field is clogged with 67 years’ worth of mud.
At its peak, the mooring field should accommodate 275 boats, says Will Sullivan, the town’s harbormaster. Wellfleet Marina Advisory Committee chair Joe Aberdale guesses it could handle more — perhaps 350 boats. Today, only 70 to 80 vessels occupy the mooring buoys, according to Aberdale. And the lack of boating activity has had ripple effects on the vitality of the town and of businesses near the marina.
Boaters can access their boats in the mooring field only for around half of each tide, says Sullivan. The rest of the time, boats sit in sediment, inaccessible. “The amount of time I can actually use my boat has diminished over the years,” says Doug Straus, who is also a member of the marina advisory committee. He says that he contemplated not putting his boat in the water at all this year.
Extended time sitting on the mud can damage boats. Straus notes that it takes a toll on his transducer (also known as a fishfinder), forcing him to replace it about every two years. John Wolf, who is the chair of the town’s select board, says he had a boat in the mooring field until 2020; the mud caused his bronze rudder fittings to dissolve, and they needed to be replaced every three weeks during the boating season.
The sediment buildup can also cause problems during a rising tide if two boats near each other draw different amounts of water. If, as the tide rises, one boat is stuck in the mud and the other boat is free, a sudden change of wind direction can swing the free boat into the stuck one. These situations can usually be dealt with by the harbormaster, says Sullivan, but if they’re not averted, boats are damaged when they collide.
Most sailboats can’t use the mooring field at all at this point. The sediment in most of the field has gotten so deep that boats that draw over five feet of water are never accessible, Sullivan says.
Not all parts of the mooring field are affected equally, Sullivan says. The two rows of buoys nearest the federal channel are nearly always accessible, since mud there slid down into the channel after it was dredged in 2020.
Which reveals another problem: the fact that the silt on the mooring field has begun gradually sliding back into the channel, Aberdale says, makes the need for maintenance dredging in the federal channel and inner harbor more urgent. “Without dredging in the mooring field,” he says, “that will continue to be a cause for the town to spend money to control it.”
Given its limitations, demand for spots on the field has been decreasing steadily over the years to the point that, Sullivan says, the town got rid of its waitlist for mooring permits a few years ago. For over a decade, there has been no waiting for a spot here.
Meanwhile, for the recently dredged boatslip, demand is high. Straus said that he has spent 22 years on the waiting list for an outboard motor slip. This March, as he made plans for the season, there were still 14 people ahead of him.
The lack of demand for buoys is a bit of a mirage, however. Even though fewer than 100 people are using the mooring field, there are 225 active permit holders, Sullivan says. That’s because people want to hold on to their spaces in the field, says Aberdale. “The 225 are continuing to pay for their permits, even though most of them are not using their boats, so that they don’t lose their spots,” he says.
If mooring field dredging were to be approved, “we’d be getting a lot of phone calls,” Sullivan adds.
Each mooring permit costs $300. Sullivan estimates that the mooring field could handle around 50 more boats than there are permits issued currently, so he estimates that the town is losing out on $15,000 per year in permit income, plus more from excise tax on boats.
“But that is not the total impact,” he says. An economic impact analysis by Michigan State University’s Recreation Marine Research Center conducted in 2015 found that, at that time, for every dollar Wellfleet boaters pay for their mooring permits, they spend $7 to $15 on amenities, goods, equipment, and local businesses, ranging from gas and food to mooring and launch services to art from galleries.
Because the majority of the 225 permit holders don’t actually keep a boat in the field, the extra dollars not being spent in town would be in the hundreds of thousands, if the researchers’ formula is correct.
Aberdale points out another side effect of not dredging: marina self-sufficiency. When the mooring field is full, the permits generate enough to cover the cost of maintenance for the marina, he says. Without sufficient permit income, the marina “is going to have to look to the town treasury for funding,” he says.
Dredging the mooring field has been on the town’s agenda for over a decade, and over the last year, debate over getting it done became contentious. The Army Corps of Engineers determined that the dredging — particularly because the town has broken “continuity” by allowing more than 30 years to elapse between dredgings — is likely to create an environmental impact significant enough to require the town to offset it. One option was for the town to carry out an environmental restoration project to mitigate the effect of the dredging. But after two years of arguing over the terms of the restoration that became complicated by some townspeople and select board members’ distrust of the federal agency, the select board last November voted to pay a penalty of $4.48 million rather than carry out a restoration project.
That decision to pay, however, has not yet been put to a vote by the townspeople. The select board did not bring the item to town meeting this spring.
Aberdale says he thinks the town should pay the penalty “and then move ahead on two fronts: dredging the mooring field and doing maintenance dredging.”
Sullivan says he wants the dredging to happen, but he also says, “Spending $5 million before you start digging? That’s a huge burden for taxpayers.”
