It’s about 8:20 on Friday morning, and Jeff Drum is piloting his 19-foot Scout, which has a 3-foot draft, out Bogue Inlet, 15 or so minutes after leaving Dudley’s Marina in Swansboro. Like many people who purchase property here along the Crystal Coast, Jeff is enjoying a nice early morning on the ocean water just seaward of past the breakers. My name is Denis Raczkowski, the baker/broker behind Emerald Isle Vacation Home Specialist. “That’s bottom,” he said, when there’s a light bump. A few minutes later, he says it again, when there’s a slightly more significant bump. Mr. Drum, who is an expert on these waters said, “I’m out here almost every day navigating the treacherous Bogue Inlet, the crucial passageway to the ocean for boaters in western Carteret County and eastern Onslow County between Bogue Sound, the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean and “It’s gotten shoaled up pretty bad in the last couple of months.” And that’s the reason why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredge vessel, the Merritt, will be operating for the next week or so in a critical part of the Bogue Inlet in what locals refer to as Dudley’s Channel. The area is right after boaters turn south out of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and is roughly across from Dudley’s Marina in Swansboro and near Dudley’s Island. Heavy shoaling in the vicinity of Bogue Inlet has grown over recent months making the waterway inaccessible to vessels with a draft greater than three feet.
The Corps dredge boat, the Merritt, routinely patrols off the coast of North Carolina. It is a side-casting dredge, it scoops up material and tosses it aside, and working with the tides, a side-casting dredge allows for faster movement of sand, opposed to other types of dredges. The Carteret County Shore Protection Office, the local agency that takes the lead in coordinating dredging and beach nourishment efforts, is pretty stoked that the dredging will get done so quickly. It’s gotten shoaled up pretty bad in the last couple of months. The work which started in early February is expected to last about a week. Dredging at the bar will be paid for by funds from the federal government with a price range of $70,000 to $110,000 for the week-long work by the Merritt. Federal money is huge. Previously, local governments, Carteret County, Onslow County, Swansboro, Emerald Isle, Cape Carteret, Cedar Point and Bogue all had to dig deep to augment dredging money available from the state’s shallow inlet dredging fund.
The county is asking recreational boaters to exercise caution navigating the inlet and maintain a safe distance from the dredging activity. Recreational boaters who come in are asking a lot of questions, wondering if the Inlet is safe. Locals and marina owners alike instruct boaters to watch the water and read it. Right now, it’s probably safer to traverse the inlet at or near low tide rather than at high tide. At low tide, you can more readily see the really low water; at high tide, it’s more deceptive. It might look safe, but it might not be so — and it changes fast. Bottom line, it’s pretty much common sense. If you see white water, you know it’s too shallow. At any rate, there hasn’t been any recent hard groundings reported which cause damage to boats. But, plenty of “soft” ones, where people have had to jump out and push their boats off the shoals, most likely without causing any damage to the boat have been observed. Windy conditions, especially increasing wind from the southwest, make navigating the shallow inlet that much more difficult. Locals are concerned about the upcoming Spring Break and Memorial Day weekend when the so-called Raleigh Navy will arrive, and the waters will get more crowded, and the boats almost surely will be piloted by more people who are less familiar with the inlet, and who might be a little less inclined, for a variety of reasons, to exercise enough caution.
How do you make the Inlet safer long term? Jetties might be the answer, but even those wouldn’t be a sure thing. It’s not like you can expect a channel in an inlet to remain stable, no matter what you do. It’s not a canal. A canal is between land. Land is stable, and this inlet is wide. An inlet is like a snake, with curves, and it moves all the time. Mr. Drum agreed. He has seen Bogue Inlet shift its main path every decade or so through his lifetime. Emerald Isle paid more than $11 million, including grant funds, to move the channel west, away from the valuable residential areas and away from the rapidly eroding western recreational tip of Bogue Banks known as The Point. The project involved a dike that blocked the existing channel so water would have to flow into a new channel that was dredged. The 710,000 cubic yards of dredged sand was piped to shore as nourishment for 4.5 miles of beach in western Emerald Isle. Experts at the time thought they might need to repeat the process in 15 years, which would have been 2020. That wasn’t the case, so the move has outlived expectations.
Storms also open and close inlets, and dredging can only do so much. Dredges like the Merritt just move sand and silt from one location to another, and tides and storms and winds eventually move that material back. A better plan might be for dredges to take up that sand and silt and deposit it elsewhere, as they once did to create a chain of man made islands in the Intracoastal Waterway near Swansboro and Cedar Point. Those islands might not be natural at first, but they do so eventually, becoming part of the land- and waterscape, and habitat for marine and terrestrial critters.
Another issue is a shift in peoples’ attitudes about fishing and boating. In the old days, folks were happy ‘puttering around’ in small boats and getting out when they could, working with the tides and judging the conditions to make sure they would be safe. Now, everyone’s in a hurry; they want to get in and out, when they want to get in and out. That's not likely going to change. But maybe, people need to try a little harder to adjust to nature, instead of expecting nature to adjust to them.
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