Mooring field makeover complete

During the active storm season of 2004, several boats moored on the city’s bayfront broke free and crashed into other vessels. One of the anchorless boats collided into the docks in front of Golden Gate Point condos.
Then, again during Tropical Storm Debby, wind and waves broke at least seven boats free, uprooting trees and ripping the sidewalks on shore at Bayfront Park.

A long-planned mooring project designed to prevent that from happening was recently completed.

The city project took longer than anticipated after delays due to a series of problems that started a few years ago. Construction was abruptly halted in 2010, after most of the screw-in anchors being installed at the bottom of Sarasota Bay failed.

New white mooring balls now dot the bayfront, and, starting Nov. 1, boaters will have to pay a fee to tie up to them. The city changed contractors after the 2010 delay, and the new mooring balls are anchored to heavy-duty steel beams driven 25 feet into the bay bottom.

The city used more than $500,000 in grants from the West Coast Inland Navigation District (WCIND) and oversaw the mooring field installation. The plans call for Marina Jack’s parent company, Jack Graham Inc., to manage the harbor area, where vessels will hook up to the mooring balls. Marina Jack staff will collect rent, provide restrooms, showers and laundry facilities and pump out sewage holding tanks, as well as ferry moored boaters ashore.

After delays throughout the process, Bob Soran, president of Jack Graham Inc., is happy to see the new mooring balls finally on the water. He notes that Sarasota now joins 10 other Florida municipalities that have a managed mooring field.

“I never dreamt it would take this long to get that mooring field in,” Soran said.

But the new state-of-the-art mooring field isn’t winning the admiration of everyone.

Boaters in Sarasota’s 99-acre mooring field area must pay to use the moorings or relocate to an area outside the boundary.

Some liveaboard boaters, such as Byron Schenk, will have to move to different waters because of mooring field rates and the cost of required insurance. Monthly mooring rates start at $250. Right now, those boaters are anchored in the mooring field for free.

“I know a few who are staying, but not many,” said Schenk, a former shrimp boat captain who lives on a sailboat on the bayfront.

Now that the project is complete, it ends two decades of controversy. The city has wrestled for 20 years with the concept of a mooring field off City Island, after trying to decide how to establish a field that many local boaters vigorously opposed.

The city has grappled with a way to provide a secure anchorage and set up a method of disposing of waste from the moored boats. There were instances of sewage and trash reaching shore, including a portable toilet washing ashore once.

“The whole goal was to eliminate that problem,” said Sam Chavers, harbormaster at Marina Jack.

The heavy-duty moorings are designed to prevent boats from breaking free during storms.

“Sarasota police have removed more than 100 vessels, at taxpayers’ expense, from local shorelines in the past years, and engineered moorings are a step in the right direction to cure this problem,” said Sarasota Police Marine Capt. Bruce King.

During an interview Friday, Chavers pointed to a photo that showed how contractors installed the steel beam into the bay’s seafloor. A specially-designed load dampening rope connects mooring balls to the steel beam anchor.

J.R. Ekins, who has lived on a 42-foot houseboat on the bayfront for eight years, said he thinks the new mooring field will prevent boats from breaking loose during storms.

“I was the first guy on the waiting list,” Ekins said about the new mooring field.