5 days ago
The Coast Guard wants to remove hundreds of buoys. Local boaters say: Don't take mine!
But we no longer need to navigate the way our ancestors did, and so the US Coast Guard says
it's time to update it for the present, launching a massive review of nearly each buoy along the New England coast to determine how many can be removed.
'We're several decades into the GPS era,' said Matt Stuck, the Coast Guard's chief of waterways management for the Northeast district, who explained that the buoy system has never undergone a wholesale review in the turn-by-turn-world.
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In May, the Coast Guard put out a proposal to review 4,700 buoys, which it classifies as 'Aids to Navigation,' that dot the coastline from New Jersey to the Canadian border in Maine.
That proposal listed all buoys under consideration for potential removal, and it was shockingly long, sparing no corner of the Northeast district in the first round of discussion. Big-boy ocean buoys — there are 1,700 of them in the district, serviced by a fleet of just six buoy tenders — are certainly on the list, but so are a surprisingly high number of buoys in recreational areas.
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'To get good feedback, you have to give the public something good to chew on,' said Stuck, whose agency received 2,800 comments — from yachts and paddleboarders, jet skis and sailboats, aluminum Lunds and skipping Boston Whalers.
'It's fair to say that few to none said this is a great idea,' he said.
The first round of nominees made news first in the boating world, with everyone agreeing: Don't take mine. But it's happening, and so a smaller list will be released later this summer, with the Coast Guard getting more specific about what it is thinking and why.
'It's a fair question by the Coast Guard to ask,' said David Kennedy, the manager of governmental affairs for the 700,000-member Boat Owners Association of the United States. 'What do we have out there, what do people need? They are resource-constrained like everyone else.'
Kennedy said there are some that make sense
to eliminate, like the 10 deep-sea buoys lining the straight-line channel into New York City, primarily used by giant boats that just crossed an ocean with sophisticated electronics. We can get rid of some of those.
But so many of the nominees were in smaller harbors that are primarily used by recreational boaters, including notoriously rocky entrances like Woods Hole. 'We are not there yet. You really need to be in the channel,' Kennedy said. 'It's a challenging place based on the tide.'
Nine of the Woods Hole buoys that currently allow for that to happen safely did not escape the first list. But it doesn't mean all or any of them will go, just that this is a Northeast-wide conversation, the Coast Guard insists.
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'We need to right-size the system for the way people are navigating,' Stuck said. 'This is not a cost-cutting measure. This is the first time we've looked at it from a wholesale perspective. The buoy system will never go away. This is about targeting the resources to the buoys that reduce the most risk for mariners.'
On the elbow of Cape Ann, there are six in a row along the coast connecting Rockport to Gloucester, whose harbormaster, Christopher Lucido, rallied local input with an email that argued good seamanship emphasizes avoiding reliance on one system, and that there is still significant value and reassurance to confirm a vessel's proximity to underwater hazards such as ledges and rock piles.
The Coast Guard has emphasized that it's not interested in getting rid of buoys that mark a danger hidden beneath. 'Eighty-five percent of the buoys we have do the highest-level risk reduction for mariners,' Stuck said, 'like directly mark a rock or shoal, or the inside of a channel so people don't cut a corner.'
There are some hazards that GPS already navigates better, and this, he said, is a conversation about those.
But for some boaters, it's a conversation about erasing parts of a map across our oceans and into our harbors, built over the centuries. About undoing a system that's a gift from the past, whispering to just remember 'red, right, returning,' and all will be safe.
An interactive map showing all the buoys under consideration can be found at:
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Billy Baker can be reached at
