Bryan’s Town Hall on Hull Bay Boat Ramp Raises Pointed Questions

North Side residents did not hold back Tuesday night at a town hall meeting with the governor that was billed as an opportunity to learn about the new boat ramp planned for Hull Bay.

Residents voiced concern at plans that call for the ramp project to go out to bid in March and begin construction in the summer – hurricane season – with no guarantee a temporary ramp will be put in place to accommodate the many North Side fishers who make their living from the sea.

Some questioned whether a new boat ramp design is needed at all, at times yelling that the new launch should just replicate the old.

And while the plans call for improved parking on a quarter acre at the west end of the bay to help accommodate 12 to 15 boat trailers, some voiced anger that parking is scarce for locals since a food truck opened last month in conjunction with two villas and six cottage vacation rentals constructed across from the beach, with no requirement that the restaurant provide its own parking because it is grandfathered under long-ago zoning laws.

The ramp project has been 10 years in the waiting, with funding finally allocated by the V.I. Legislature in 2021. Plans call for the new ramp to be 27 feet longer than the existing structure, to enable boaters to launch on a gentler slope and into deeper water than the current 2½ to 3 feet, said Department of Planning and Natural Resources Commissioner Jean-Pierre Oriol.

Oriol attended the town hall along with Lt. Gov. Tregenza Roach, Public Works Commissioner Derek Gabriel, V.I. Police Commissioner Ray Martinez, and St. Thomas-Water Island Administrator Avery Lewis. More than 200 residents filled the grassy courtyard at The Hideaway, where the meeting was held.

“You’ve given a timeline of summer, and you’ve stated that the ramp will be shut down to use. If you look out into that bay – there’s a lot of boats in that bay and summer is hurricane season,” said Robert Greaux. “So you’re pretty much telling a lot of the guys here that have got their boats in that bay that they’ve got to either pull their boat out and not fish for the time frame that this ramp is being built, or leave their boat in the water and take a chance to have to rush to pull their boat out if a storm is on the way,” he said.

“They have to go all the way around to the other side of the island to pull a boat, to bring it all the way back up to the North Side again,” said Greaux, who said that many of the trailers are fine for short hauls, but not up to that journey.

While a temporary ramp is an option, and funding can be put towards that, said Oriol, “what I think we were going to do is plan on scheduling this properly so we’re not creating an impact, particularly during the more active portions of the storm season.”

To which Greaux replied, after hurricane season comes ground sea season in Hull Bay.

“You have very volatile seas here. You have times where it’s last minute, you run down after work, you’re pulling your boat out of the water because the ground sea is building. You don’t want your boat staying here in some of these ground seas that come through, because you won’t have a boat the next day,” said Greaux.