RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — Space at marinas and harbors is pricey in Palm Beach County. To offset the cost, the city of Riviera Beach has investigated building three mooring fields.
"A really good mooring has a setup that you can buy that's made for hurricanes, snaps into the helix in the bottom, comes up, and fastens to a buoy, and then from the buoy, there's a line that goes up that you tie your boat to," John Sprague said.
Sprague heads up the project for the city. He said one field would go in the Phil Foster Park area, the second on the west side of the Intracoastal Waterway between the city marina and Blue Heron Bridge, and another south of Peanut Island for a total of 180 moors. Sprague said the project would look like the mooring field at Dinner Key Marina in Miami.
"Every mooring is designed for a certain sized boat," he said. "So when it's swinging around with wind and currents, it can't hit another boat that's also circling around in wind and current."
The project is expected to help prevent boats from getting loose during a storm. George Gentile, with the Marine Industry Association of Palm Beach County, has seen the need.
"We've also recently seen some vessels that have broken away from their anchoring not in the mooring fields and damaged other boats in other marinas that are trying to be protected during storm events," Gentile said.
Sprague said the cost is roughly $4,500 a mooring.
Along with the mooring field, Sprague said, the city will supply a pump-out boat daily for raw sewage and a water taxi for folks to go ashore. He said the city will begin applying for permits next week and work would begin sometime in October 2021.