At Salton Sea, dredging makes way for large boats

Doug Veirs remembers boating on the Salton Sea more than 30 years ago, fishing for corvina and enjoying the calm waters. The corvina are long gone — a casualty of the shrinking sea's increasing salinity — but if Veirs' plan works, a marina in North Shore will soon be open to large boats for the first time in years.

The Salton Sea has long been a prime destination for boating, with its high buoyancy and low elevation making for smooth, speedy sailing. But as the shoreline has receded in recent years, it's gotten harder for large boats to access the water. A 2008 speed-boat race made headlines, but organizers had to use a crane to lower the boats from the shore into the water.

That didn't seem right to Veirs, who started thinking almost a decade ago that he could do something to improve access. And now his San Bernardino-based company, DEVCO Sandblasting and Industrial Coating, Inc., is dredging the marina at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area in North Shore, removing enough mud and sediment to allow deep-hulled boats to get out onto the lake.

"Look at this beautiful resource," Veirs said on Tuesday, looking across the water. "Wouldn't it be nice to see a sailboat out there?"

Veirs, his son and another employee have been dredging for two weeks, and they expect to finish by mid-April. They're digging 10 feet deep, and Veirs said boats as deep as six to eight feet should be able to pass through.

The state parks department has periodically dredged the marina, most recently five years ago, said Kathy Dice, superintendent for Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Salton Sea Sector. But those dredges weren't very thorough and didn't last long, especially as the sea kept shrinking and sediment kept building up in the channel.

"With the equipment we've used in the past, we sit an excavator on the side of the channel, and we reach in, and we dig out," Dice said. "We create kind of a v-shaped canyon."

But several years ago, Veirs proposed an innovative new method: Stretching a barge across the channel, then placing a small excavator on the barge. The excavator reaches a mechanical arm down into the water and scoops up mud and sediment from the sea floor, before dumping it into a small truck waiting on the barge.

The result, if all goes according to plan, will be a much more thorough dredge, with 10 feet of mud and sediment cleared from one side of the channel to the other.

"You've got to be able to get out on the sea, because you can't use any equipment to get close, because the water has receded so much," Veirs said. "That goo — if you get big machines in there, you can't get 'em near it, because they'll sink. And that's the main reason everything stopped down here."

Veirs and Dice hope the newly accessible marina attracts boaters, boosting the local economy and drawing attention to the plight of the Salton Sea. As the shoreline recedes, habitats are disappearing and exposed dust is blowing into the air, in what experts have described as a looming environmental and public health disaster.

As he's worked on the dredging proposal over the last few years, Veirs said, he's received encouragement from many locals, especially those who remember the Salton Sea's heyday as a tourist mecca. It's always bothered him that people who moved to the area with boating in mind have found themselves increasingly unable to access the water.

"I'd see these people and I just felt I could help. They have these beautiful marinas, but they couldn't use them no more," he said. "And you'd sit down with them: 'Oh, it used to be so nice to go out on the sea, and now we can't get on the sea anymore.' And I think that done something to me in the back of my mind."

Veirs said he's working with the Imperial Irrigation District to secure permits for similar dredging projects at other marinas, assuming this one goes according to plan. DEVCO is doing the North Shore dredging project for free, in an effort to show local officials that it's possible, he added. The company would need to be paid for future work.

For the dredging project's backers, a main goal is to drum up interest in another speed-boat race.

"This is one of the fastest bodies of water in the world," said Juan Delara, president of the board of directors of the Salton Sea Action Committee, a nonprofit supporting DEVCO's work. "A lot of speed-boat records have been broken out here."

It's not clear how much longer the Salton Sea will be able to support boating, even if Veirs is able to dredge the other marinas. The sea could start shrinking much more quickly in 2017, when a water transfer deal known as the Quantification Settlement Agreement is scheduled to take effect. The deal will result in agricultural runoff, which currently flows into the sea, being diverted to urban areas, including San Diego and the Coachella Valley.

People interested in boating on the Salton Sea shouldn't wait long, Dice said.

"It's such a beautiful location. We hope to get the word out: 'Come out here, for however long it lasts,'" she said. "We want to get the word out about this special place."

Sammy Roth covers energy for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.

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