Seeing a vessel on the rocks is always a sad sight, and it makes you wonder what went wrong. Bad seamanship? Failed engine on a lee shore? Failed tack too close to shore? Bad navigation? Or maybe just another bareboater running aground, as they are wont to do! Sometime Friday a 53-foot Sunsail monohull ended up on the very east end of Beef Island — at the end of Salvage Beach, as the shoreline is locally known.
The situation that unfolded with the salvage efforts yet again highlighted the lack of government intervention or regulations that need to be put in place to ensure minimum environmental damage in a salvage operation — and fines for environmental damage by vessels that run aground or anchor in areas where they are inflicting irreparable damage to our coral reef ecosystem.
Fines for damage
Perhaps if there were an efficient method of fining for such damage, we would see some better or more cautious boat operators out in our waters. Most people would be quite amazed to know how many bareboat groundings there are on a weekly basis. Most of the bareboaters (and a couple of freighters) who ground out get away with it as they also do when they drag their anchors through our coral — no one sees, no one knows, no one cares. The operators haven’t been told to think differently. And certainly the bareboat companies are not doing their job at briefings on the importance of taking care of our seabed and practising good seamanship.
The Virgin Islands is fortunate to have a very professional salvage company working in its waters, and while they do their best to minimise damage, there is usually going to be damage done while getting a boat off a reef. With the Sunsail boat at the end of Beef, there will be damage to the regrowth of endangered elkhorn coral on that shoreline. The damage, however, will probably not be as much as done by the megayacht indiscriminately anchored on coral in Muskmelon Bay at Guana Island on Sunday.
‘Need for controls’
What highlighted the need for controls in this weekend’s salvage operation is the same issue that pertains to heavy equipment operators on land: the lack of control and education of those operators. The salvage effort involved a large excavator. This excavator had to go along the back road that parallels Trellis Bay — over the hump by the salt pond and then along Salvage Beach (which is comprised of coral rubble and boulders) in order to get to where the Sunsail boat was lying.
The excavator tore along the road, and even where there was room to manoeuvre to avoid trees, it just pushed them over. Testosterone pumping and fun in the big machine!
Once at Salvage Beach the driver traversed the flat area on top of the coral rubble berms and drove over the low, windblown, salt-spray-stunted seagrape and button mangrove bushes that make up the shoreline’s protective vegetation. It will probably grow back, but it was driven over four times — squashed and splintered. Once at the boat, the excavator then pushed the coral rubble out towards the boat, forming a groin so that he could assist the salvage boat in getting the Sunsail boat turned over so the holes in the hull could be patched and the boat floated and taken to a yard.
The boat will be salvaged — the trees pushed down likely will grow back, the hole dug by the excavator will fill back in with a few big storms — but the groin he formed, if it remains, will affect long shore drift, and the whole saga has stressed the environment again.
Money to be made
What remains is the fact that something must be done to get compensation for damage done to the environment by such groundings and the increasing problem of anchor damage. That the government cares so little about this endless damage being inflicted on the marine environment and that officials are unable to act speedily in times of such a disaster once again raises a question: Do they actually care?
By fining boats for such damage, they could actually gain revenue that could be invested back into protecting the marine environment. Make some revenue? Now that is something the government wants to do. I await the Department of Disaster Management, the Ports Authority, the Shipping Registry, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Labour, the National Parks Trust and the Conservation and Fisheries Department to see the revenue opportunity and act speedily. There is money to be made out on the waters on a daily basis!