New update, but this quote astounds me: To the Coast Guard, which maintains around 1,700 large ocean buoys from the easternmost point of Maine, at the Canadian border, to northern New Jersey, reassessing the usefulness of specific buoys is practical and realistic. Among other reasons, the agency has pointed to “smartphone navigation apps that are more widely available and affordable.”
Obviously, the person at the USCG who wrote this was never 25 miles out in the Gulf of Maine where there are absolutely no cell signals!!
New England Boaters Battle a Coast Guard Plan to Remove Beloved Buoys
The agency said a proposal to get rid of 350 navigational buoys from Maine to New Jersey made sense after decades of advancement in electronic navigation tools.
When the electrical system on Dominic Zanke’s 42-foot fishing boat, Tyrant, suddenly failed one day this spring, the veteran lobsterman was 35 miles out to sea, with no radio or radar to guide him home.
Mr. Zanke, who fishes out of Stonington, Maine, saw little cause for worry. He knew he could rely on an old-school fallback: the sprawling network of Coast Guard navigational buoys that dot the coastline from Maine to New Jersey. Generations of fishermen, ferry captains and recreational boaters have taken comfort in knowing that if all else fails, the buoys will be there.
In recent months, though, that faith has been shaken by a Coast Guard proposal to do away with roughly 350 buoys, a winnowing the agency says makes sense given decades of advancement in electronic tools for navigation.
To some who have used the buoys to skirt disaster on foggy shoals and in narrow channels rocked by squalls, the plan to remove them feels like a betrayal.
“What is the value of a life at sea?” said Jon Wilson, an elder statesman of Maine’s sailing community and the founder of WoodenBoat magazine. “There were marine accidents that made people say, ‘We need a buoy here.’ There’s a genius to the system, and it has worked for a reason.”
Many coastal residents feel a deep attachment to the Coast Guard buoys anchored off their shores. Bigger and sturdier than the colorful buoys that lobstermen use to mark their trap locations, the navigational buoys are made of steel, typically painted a uniform red or green, and tower as high as 26 feet above the water, like miniature, floating lighthouses.
Their names, drawn from their perilous locations, sound like briny poetry.
Baileys Mistake Entrance Buoy 1 / Frost Ledge Lighted Bell Buoy 7 / Fifteen-Foot Rock Lighted Bell Buoy / Cross Rip Shoal South End Buoy 4.
Many light up red or green so that boaters can see them at night. Some transmit a distinctive whistle or low-pitched moan to announce themselves to approaching vessels when fog, high seas or driving rain obscures them from view.
Mr. Wilson recalled one foggy, breezy night, sailing home in Penobscot Bay in Maine, when he heard the familiar bell of the Green Ledge buoy — warning of the jutting rocks at the approach to Eggemoggin Reach — and realized the sound was coming from the wrong side of his boat. The veteran sailor understood at once that he had drifted off course.
“At night, when you’re single-handing it, there’s nothing more welcoming than that sound,” he said. “If I hadn’t heard that bell, I might have ended up on that ledge.”
To the Coast Guard, which maintains around 1,700 large ocean buoys from the easternmost point of Maine, at the Canadian border, to northern New Jersey, reassessing the usefulness of specific buoys is practical and realistic. Among other reasons,
the agency has pointed to “smartphone navigation apps that are more widely available and affordable.”
Matthew Stuck, the chief of waterways management for the Guard’s Northeast District, said he understood the deep affection many people feel for their local buoys. But emotion cannot drive decisions about which buoys remain critical, he said in an interview.
“There’s an aesthetic attachment, a love for the bell or the gong — people associate those sounds with their heritage, tradition, community,” he said. “Every buoy is important to someone. We know that. But we don’t have the resources to reduce all the risk, everywhere, at all times.”
“Our mandate,” he added, “is to use our long experience to fine-tune the system.”
The Coast Guard released
the list of buoys it planned to eliminate in April, setting a deadline of June for public comment. It received more than 3,000 responses, shattering the Northeast District’s previous record of 450. About 15 percent of the comments were impassioned defenses of specific buoys — feedback that has been especially valuable, Mr. Stuck said, as the agency tries to better understand how boaters use each buoy.
It plans to release a revised list, with fewer buoys on the chopping block, next month, and will again seek public feedback. No buoys will be removed until next year.
The goal of the reassessment, by far the largest ever undertaken in the district, is to “right-size” the system, Mr. Stuck said, not to cut costs. But he acknowledged that maintenance of the buoys is expensive and difficult. Each is pulled from the water every one to three years to check on its condition, including the steel chains that link it to concrete blocks on the ocean floor. More than 200 people work on planning and performing maintenance, on land and on six vessels known as buoy tenders.
Besides the 1,700 large buoys in the district, 3,000 smaller “harbor buoys” are also federal markers, but those are mostly locally maintained, he said. Their usefulness will also be reassessed. The system’s origins date back to the colonies, when fishermen floated wooden barrels to mark rocks.
Mariners acknowledge that some buoys could go. Some may be redundant, or out of date, in an oceanic landscape that is ever changing. But many boaters have
bristled at the scale of the Coast Guard’s proposal, and the inclusion of buoys that they say routinely help them avoid danger.
On Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, buoys targeted for elimination include Gazelle Rock Lighted Buoy 2, off Yarmouth, near waters where Nantucket-bound ferries churn past. David Condon, the Yarmouth harbor master, said the buoy alerts boaters to invisible hazards in an area where boats strike rocks every year.
High tech tools to prevent such crashes are still too costly for many boaters, Mr. Condon said. “To expect everyone out there to have them, and to keep them up-to-date, is not realistic,” he added.
Some of the buoys on the removal list float at sites of past maritime disasters. Off the coast of Plymouth, Mass., a Coast Guard buoy marks the location of the Mary Ann Rocks, where three Coast Guard crewmen drowned in March 1928 while trying to reach a passenger ship, the Robert E. Lee, that had lost its compass and been driven by a storm onto the rocks.
Coverage of the disaster in The New York Times noted the rocks’ long history of threatening boats.
According to one article, the Pilgrim leader Miles Standish nearly hit them in December 1620 while surveying Plymouth’s coast in a small boat launched from the Mayflower.
The rocks “give sinew to the emblematic arm of Cape Cod, bent in threat against the gale-blown sea,” the Times reporter wrote. “Without them there would be no Cape Cod — its soft sands would have been washed away ages ago and history would have lost grim, adventurous, hopeful chapters.”
A small, worn memorial plaque, engraved with the names of the men who died in 1928, still sits on Manomet Point in Plymouth, surrounded in summer by banks of fragrant pink beach roses, the buoy visible in the sea beyond it.
Scott Anderson, whose grandfather, Russell Anderson, helped to rescue other Coast Guard crewmen after the
boat wreck almost a century ago, said the plan to remove the buoy made no sense to him.
“A core part of the Coast Guard mission is to keep people safe,” said Mr. Anderson, who maintains a website devoted to the shipwreck. “What’s the cost of buoy maintenance compared to the cost of rescue operations?”
History shows that no system is foolproof. The captain of the Robert E. Lee
told reporters in 1928 that his lookouts had missed the buoy at the Mary Ann Rocks, despite their “careful watch,” because the storm had diminished visibility.
Chad Hunter, Plymouth’s harbor master, said there is no doubt that the buoy, now outfitted with flashing red lights and a deep whistle, remains necessary.
The rocks, in Cape Cod Bay, lie within 1.75 miles of a route used by commercial vessels heading north from the Cape Cod Canal. If the rocks are left unmarked, he said, it could increase the risk of a ship strike leading to an oil spill,
as happened in nearby Buzzards Bay in 2003.
“Boats hit the rocks every year or two,” Mr. Hunter said. “If you remove the buoy, there’s really no indication of the hazard there.”
To Mr. Zanke, the veteran Maine lobsterman who looks to the buoys when electronics falter and “the bony bottom comes up hard and sharp and fast,” the Coast Guard plan is “baffling.”
“You might as well take down all the street signs,” he said. “Since we all have GPS.”
Mr. Stuck, of the Coast Guard, stood by his unwelcome message: However permanent it seems, nothing is forever.
“Buoys,” he said, “are not eternal.”
