With fishing grounds in mind, SBPF will not dredge this year
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Because it needs more time to come up with a dredging plan that will accommodate charter and commercial fishermen as well as satisfy its own goals, the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund will not start its beach nourishment project in 2007.

Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund Executive Director Cheryl Bartlett said that SBPF is currently working on ways that it can dredge the sand it needs without wiping out fragile fishing grounds, and that its plans are on hold at the moment.

"The thing we're looking at is trying to keep the dredges out of the prime fishing area, so we're looking at all the mechanical ways of how that can happen," she said.

Bartlett asked the Conservation Commission to put off a scheduled public hearing on the project until July 18 to give the SBPF more time to flesh out its plans.

The Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund wants to rebuild the beach approximately 206 feet out from the existing shoreline with 2.6 million cubic yards of sand from a shoal west of Bass Shoal about three miles off the beach. The beach from just north of Sankaty Head Lighthouse down to Codfish Park would be re-nourished at five-year intervals or as major storms dictated.

"We're looking at the construction plan of where to do the project and seeing if we could pump sand outside of their fishing area," said Bartlett. "We have three or four things we've been working on doing [for] the project and minimizing the impacts."

The concern of charter fishing boat operators is an area about a halfmile north to a half-mile south of Sankaty Head Lighthouse that is scattered with clumps of cobblestone-size rocks, and runs from the beach to 1,200 feet off the eastern shore of Nantucket in 15 to 20 feet of water. According to charter fishermen such as Bobby DeCosta and Josh Eldridge, and commercial striper fishermen including Doug Smith, food that bass love to eat - including crabs, sand eels, sand dabs and juvenile lobster - lives in these rock piles. Additionally, strong tidal currents wash schools of squid through this area, and winter and yellow flounder breed here.

The dredging of sand, which stirs up sand and sediments, combined with the 30-inch pipe that SBPF plans to run from the dredging ship through the cobble areas and onto the beach to pump the sand on shore, and the fact that the beach will grow at least 206 feet out into the cobble areas and possibly up to 1,200 feet from shore, worries fishermen that the project will smother one of their more productive fishing areas.

DeCosta, owner and captain of the charter fishing boat Albacore, said that expanding the beach outward 1,200 feet is not an option he and other fishermen can tolerate. But he is cautiously optimistic about SBPF's early alternative ideas of relocating the pipes out of the cobble areas and possibly dumping concrete railroad ties into the water after the project is over to try to create habitat similar to that of the cobble areas.

"That cobble has been there a long time, and you can't expect to throw a bunch of concrete ties in and expect things to grow there, [but] I've got to give them credit, they're working on

it," DeCosta said. I