PORTSMOUTH — Citing high maintenance costs and the growth of GPS-based positioning technology, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) has proposed the removal of hundreds of navigation buoys in the Northeast, including about 10 in the Portsmouth area.

The threatened navigation aids include a lighted buoy in East Passage, the Musselbed Shoals gong buoy, the Patience Island lighted bell buoy, and the Sandy Point Junction lighten bell buoy off Prudence Island.

Members of the public have until mid-June to comment on the proposal.

“It’s not a good thing,” said Abigail Brown, who chairs the Portsmouth Harbor Commission. “Removing buoys is one of the most dangerous things you can ever do.”

The fact that many modern-day boaters rely on GPS is not a good enough reason to discontinue physical navigational aids, she said.

“The problem with GPS is — you know what’s going on with Newark at the airport,” Brown said, referring to radar screens that went black last Friday during a brief outage at Newark Airport in New Jersey. This followed another radar outage less than two weeks earlier. 

“There are people who don’t have GPS,” said Brown, acknowledging she’s an “old school” sailor. “For hundreds of years we’ve had all kinds of markers. GPS is a wonderful tool, but I still use paper charts. If you’re out sailing the Atlantic and you lose your electronics, you’re pretty much screwed. You need something to see to be able to navigate in a channel.”

Although it’s not among those buoys being targeted by the USCG, Brown pointed to one off Gould Island in the Sakonnet River as an example of how badly physical navigational aids are needed.

“There’s a huge rock in there and it’s marked by the Coast Guard. But the deal is, at least twice a year some moron goes around there and hits it. At certain tides, like in a king tide, the buoy can be under water,” said Brown, adding, “Certain people who operate boats are not qualified to do so.”

The harbor panel will formally oppose USCG’s proposal. “It’s a very dangerous idea,” Brown said.

Terri Cortvriend is a state representative who owns her own marine plumbing firm, once worked as a yacht captain and holds a private pilot’s license and a USCG Captain’s license. While she hadn’t yet seen the proposal in great detail, Cortvriend said she agreed with Brown. Navigation buoys are “failsafes,” she said.

“It’s old school, but it’s a visual thing and it gives you a clue. A lot of people don’t know how to use their GPS anyway,” she said. “It’s not going to be good for anybody.”

‘It’s a safety issue’

They defeated a similar plan nearly a decade ago. Now, Little Compton mariners hope for the same result as the USCG plans, again, to remove what locals say is a crucial navigational aid one mile west of the entrance to Sakonnet Harbor.

Even in this age of electronic navigation and high tech GPS tracking, they say the bright red “middle buoy,” officially known as Sakonnet River Bell Buoy 2A, is vital and needs to be kept for the safety of young sailors out of Sakonnet Yacht Club, fishermen lost in the fog and weary sailors who need to duck into the harbor in foul weather.

“It’s really a safety issue,” longtime lobsterman and Little Compton Town Council member Gary Mataronas said.

“You get these guys out there, and it happened to me when I was a kid … If you were out there in the fog and you didn’t know where you were, you’d shut the engine off and listen to the bell out at the islands or the one at the river, 2A. It’s a tremendous aid to navigation.”

The USCG first tried removing 2A in 2016, along with another buoy known affectionately as “the hooter” for the sound it made as it bobbed up and down in the chop. Then as now, local mariners protested and while the hooter was ultimately removed, the Coast Guard agreed to leave 2A in place.

Apart from the growing number of inexperienced boaters on the water and the improvement of positioning technology, not much has changed out there since then, Mataronas said. There are still unprepared boaters, still young Sakonnet Yacht Club sailors who don’t have electronic equipment aboard, still plenty of fog. And the large fish traps off the Sakonnet coast, of which 2A was particularly useful in helping boaters avoid, still go in every summer.

By the time town council members wrote to U.S. Sen. Jack Reed last week to ask for federal assistance in convincing Coast Guard officials to change their minds, opposition here had already come from other fronts.

Sakonnet Point is a dangerous place, yacht club commodore Bruce Chafee wrote to the Coast Guard in imploring officials to reconsider.

The point “combines open ocean, a rocky coast, and fog. That’s why they built a lighthouse there! Our open, southern exposure provides regular 4-6-foot rollers, with 15-knot generated chop on top. Our coast is rocky and irregular. Our cooler water produces frequent summer fog. Into these conditions we send our 9 (to) 17-year-old kids. They learn to sail in tough conditions, and also to rely on navigational aids and bearings. Their crucial aid is Bell Buoy 2A.”

Coast Guard plan

Matthew Stuck, USCG’s first district chief of waterways management, said the latest proposal comes as the Coast Guard works to “rightsize” its navigational aids, many of which predate GPS technology.

Removing navigational aids no longer deemed necessary, he wrote in a Coast Guard notice, “will result in the most sustainable navigation risk reduction to support and complement modern mariners” while delivering “effective, economical service (at) acceptable cost.”

Other buoys nearby have been targeted for removal as well, including one about two miles south of the entrance to the Westport Harbor federal channel.

Members of the public have until Friday, June 13, to respond to the proposal. E-mails can be sent to the Coast Guard at AD01-SMB-DPWPubliccomments@uscg.mil.

With additional reporting by Ted Hayes (thayes@eastbaymediagroup.com).