Posted on March 11, 2020
When will Bathtub Reef Beach re-open?
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
“We’ve got to wait until the wind and the water calm down before we re-open,” said Martin County Coastal Engineer Kathy FitzPatrick. “We want to have a beach that’s usable and that we can guarantee to stay open a while.”
The county closed the popular beach near the south end of Hutchinson Island in mid-November after a combination of high tides, waves and wind washed away most of its sand, leaving a sharp drop-off of several feet from the dune to the water.
Waves at Bathtub “were approaching the top of the dune” Monday morning, FitzPatrick said.
Surf around Stuart ranged from 8 feet 6 inches to 10 feet; and winds, mostly from the east, ranged from 17 to 22 mph, according to Magic Seaweed, a website used by surfers.
“On top of all that wind,” FitzPatrick said, tides will be particularly high over the next few days because of a full moon Monday and Tuesday nights.
The surf should drop to less than 2 feet Friday and Saturday with winds in the single digits, according to Magic Seaweed.
County official had planned to do a major beach renourishment project at Bathtub this spring but postponed it because they didn’t get any qualified bids from contractors. By then — mid-February — there wasn’t enough time to finish the project by April 1, when sea turtle nesting season gets into full swing.
Nesting season officially runs from March 1 through Nov. 15, but a leatherback turtle already has laid eggs near Santa Lucea Beach, a couple of miles north of Bathtub Beach.
Scaled back
Instead, the county hired a contractor to haul sand to the site, and county crews rebuilt the seriously damaged southern section of the dune to protect the park and nearby MacArthur Boulevard, the only road connecting the Sailfish Point neighborhood and the mainland.
Source: tcpalm.com
