The Magens Bay Authority board has voted to collaborate with the Department of Planning and Natural Resources on an official water use plan for the bay that has seen increasingly heavy marine traffic in recent years. It also voted to support draft legislation by Sen. Marvin Blyden concerning anchoring in the bay, which under Virgin Islands law is a designated area of special concern.

Both motions were brought by board member Dayle Barry at the authority’s meeting on Tuesday, held via Zoom, and both passed unanimously.

Boating has become an issue of increasing concern since the territory’s charter industry exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020, closed most neighboring borders, including the British Virgin Islands, and catapulted the U.S. Virgin Islands to the top of an industry that had been dominated by the BVI.

The impacts have been especially apparent in Magens Bay, which is billed as one of the Top 10 most beautiful beaches in the world and at times is home to more than a dozen vessels, including massive charter yachts.

In 2020, the Virgin Islands Professional Charter Association, or VIPCA, a nonprofit that represents the charter industry, approached the governor about the infrastructure needed to help responsibly expand the industry, including overnight moorings, DPNR Commissioner Jean Pierre Oriol told a recent meeting of the League of Women Voters. At the time the BVI had more than 600 and the USVI just 14, he said.

In March 2021, with more than 200 new vessels registered to DPNR since the start of the pandemic one year earlier, the V.I. Legislature approved VIPCA’s plans to install and manage 100 helix-type anchored moorings across the territory to sustain the demand for transient vessels — those staying overnight — and to protect the marine environment from anchoring, which can destroy grassy sea beds and coral.

In September, the territory doubled that number to 200 moorings in a public-private partnership with VIPCA — including six day-use and nine transient moorings for Magens Bay.

The proposed layout would place the moorings some 500 feet offshore, about 250 feet past the swim buoys, and would alternate between transient and day use, so that boats cannot raft up and so that overnight vessels have room to swing in the current, according to Oriol. The latter would be limited to three days and monitored by VIPCA, which has developed an app to track users.

Barry, who heads the Magens Bay board’s Planning, Policy, Rules and Regulations Committee, said Tuesday that its members met recently with DPNR Coastal Zone Management Director Marlon Hibbert to discuss “the need for an additional area, outside of the area that is going to be used by smaller vessels, for perhaps an anchorage for larger vessels on the outer part of the bay.”

The intent in working with the department “would be to develop an appropriate layout for the moorings if anchoring is to be prohibited. That’s one of the things that we did discuss with Mr. Hibbert that led to the discussion of a preparation of a water use plan,” he said.

“This would be the first. It would be a pilot. Being that the Magens Bay Authority is the custodian of the park, we believe it is important that the Planning, Policy, Rules and Regulations Committee be involved with the department in the preparation of such,” said Barry. “I think the commissioner has already charged Mr. Hibbert with ensuring that a water use plan is prepared for Magens Bay considering the feedback from the community that had been received regarding the matter. I think we are in a prime position to ensure a positive outcome as well as the inclusion of our input in the process.”

Regarding the cost of the project to the authority, Barry said DPNR is the planning entity and would be responsible for its implementation, with input from the planning committee.

The board also unanimously approved Barry’s motion to support draft legislation proposed by Sen. Blyden to amend Title 25, Section 404 of the V.I. Code to prohibit anchoring in certain areas of particular concern which were so designated for environmental, cultural, or historic purposes.

“The use of moorings is more protective of the bottom types within the bay than would be the use of anchors, which drop and pull every time a vessel comes in and then leaves the bay,” said Barry.

Concern for the environment, and for the residents who use the park daily, was evident at a town hall meeting in January, the board’s first since the pandemic. Some would like Magens Bay to be restricted to generational fishers only.

“That was the only thing that we wanted on Magens Bay beach. The only kind of vessel would be those traditional fishing boats,” former Sen. Ruby Simmonds Esannason said at the January meeting.

“There was never any consensus in the Legislature when I was there — I served two terms — that we would have this kind of insult to the people of these islands, having these big yachts sitting out here. We don’t know what they’re dumping, we don’t know what they are doing. I have been coming to this beach all of my life and I’m 75 years old. This is a disgrace. I want to find a way that we can rescind whatever law, whatever regulations, allow for anything to be moored in Magens Bay,” said Simmonds Esannason.

Attending Tuesday’s meeting, which was held in lieu of the usual third Friday of the month date, were board members Barbara Petersen, Cecile de Jongh, Katina Coulianos, Dayle Barry, Robert Marone, and Kevin Rodriguez, who is serving as the governor’s interim representative on the board in place of Avery Lewis, the St. Thomas/Water Island administrator who has taken a leave of absence to run for a Senate seat. Under V.I. law, candidates seeking election to the Virgin Islands Legislature are required to take a leave of absence from their governmental duties.