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12-2-25

Happy Holidays, CMBC Membership. 

I hope Thanksgiving was a blessing to all of you and hoping you are going to have a great Christmas and Holiday Season.

If you have not been down recently, I want to share with you that we have an extensive sandbar problem (can be identified as an island) that is the biggest I have ever seen there within and as well as outside the marina channel - and it is only December 1.

I have  hesitated to communicate to you  because  we have done much in terms  of hours invested in actions and activity,  but I usually only  communicate when we have results.

With more people coming down for the holidays - especially with people coming down this weekend for the Crystal Beach Christmas Party and the Chesapeake Lighted Boat parade among other events - more will see the situation so will share with you and update.

The EC especially Ed, Darrin, Roy and myself have been investing quite of bit of time contacting state and federal agencies, private contractors, consultants, equipment rental companies etc to see what we can legally do for short term fix as well as  discussing long term solutions. We have commitments from many of these to meet with us and some with specific dates.

We are trying to get expert guidance to make sure any investments we make for  solving or assisting in solving the problem is appropriate.  It has not helped that our engineer that we have been partnering with since last April has passed unexpectedly.

To be very transparent, we are dependent on the Army Corp of Engineers to schedule their commitment since last May to alter the mouth of Stemmers Run and to see what we can place there to keep that change more long lasting. I have discussed with them monthly and they cannot come out through the end of the year due to resource, budget and manpower reductions that was not expected but occurred at the Federal government level.

 I have recently contacted them yesterday  and have emailed them today  a very descriptive and comprehensive  package of photos, documents, and more explicit requests making sure all other state agencies are copied  so all know we can't do anything without significant risk to us  until they do what they do first.  We will see how well my retired selling skills are to secure a date.

We at least have some benefit knowing that our permit for dredging or doing anything with sand movement has been extended from Feb 15 to March 31.

We do know this - doing something now on December first on a short term fashion will be a waste of time and resources.  The Club with our two longest contractor partners tried out of the box thinking  last year with people who have much experience with marinas and the upper bay  and that option quite frankly did not work as sandbar was back in 2-3 weeks. 

 I am not saying that to point fingers as we tried to do something that has never been done before with as much short term guidance as we could get since we had to be done last year by February 15. It was a learning experience - agreed an expensive one. 

To do it once at that time was appropriate as a calculated risk.  To do a similar thing now is financially irresponsible.

I will share this - there is not one member in this club who has expertise in this complicated  situation of Stemmers Run and climate change with more pronounced North West Winter winds. This is new to even the experts we have met and discussed with in the past as well as now. Possible solutions that you may have been hearing as I have heard them can be good ideas, but none are close to validation yet.  The person with the best knowledge of this in our club is our Harbormaster Ed Groce and he will admit he is still looking for solutions and tactics both short term and long term.

We have to challenge legalities, finances, and avenues of expertise both short term and long term for our out-of-the box ideas and I can assure you we are doing that daily.

I don't want to share any of the specific  ideas right now as I  don't want rumors to be spread about actions that may or may not happen.

So I have shared a lot of words with no results, which is why I hesitated until now to share but you do deserve to know we are committed to this.

I also know this - with the exception of us meeting with various people in the next couple of weeks to continue to formulate ideas and move them forward, nothing will change with that sandbar out there - except it will get bigger - through Christmas so please just enjoy the holidays without worrying about this and when we know something more specific you will know something.

I will take responsibility of not sharing this sooner for the reasons I mentioned above, but should have done it sooner.

Gerry

Have a great Christmas!