TowBoatUS Beaufort Removes Trash And Debris From Barrier Islands

TowBoatUS Beaufort and owner Capt. Lee Sykes provided a matching donation with in-kind services to cover the costs of removing old boats, tires and other debris from the Rachel Carson Reserve and the Town of Beaufort in North Carolina. With guidance from BoatUS Foundation for Boating Safety and Clean Water, the large-scale marine debris removal project was selected for a NOAA Marine Debris Program grant that paid $68,000 of the recently completed project’s $175,000 cost.

“This project showed how local organizers can reach out within the community and find various stakeholders that had unique talents and skill sets to take an idea and make it a viable project,” Capt. Sykes said. “When the Reserve came to me and wanted me to get involved with this project, I said not only are we going to get involved on the operations side, but we’re going to get involved on the money side, too. We matched a lot of money to help pull this off because it was a large project.”

Removal of the debris, which included more than 43 illegal and abandoned moorings, 11 vessels and more than 62 tons of debris, took several weeks. Added Sykes, “We were all saddened by the debris. Once one or two wrecks were dumped, others followed. A handful were from Hurricane Florence. Transient vessels were having difficulty anchoring and often struck unmarked submerged objects. With downtown just on the other side of the channel, it was an eyesore to everyone.” The TowBoatUS Beaufort crew hauled the debris ashore, where the wrecks were scoured for recyclables and hazardous materials, then sent to landfills.