Posted on August 11, 2025
A crowd of people showed up for Wednesday’s Waterways Committee meeting to make their feelings known to the committee about the need for further dredging in Eel River.
In December 2024, the spit at the entrance to Eel River was dredged and the inlet widened to allow easier boat access in and out of the waterway. A sandbar, which has given boaters trouble for years, was made worse by the work by making the water more shallow, boaters said. During the meeting, the committee referred to the sandbar as “the hangnail.”
Residents Rita Foster, Daniel Rogers and Ann Marie Jordan asked that Eel River be discussed by the Waterways Committee. Rogers said that boats are scraping the bottom on the west side of Eel River and having difficulty navigating after entering the waterway from Vineyard Sound, heading north, even at high tide.
Daniel G. Frawley, another resident and boater, said even smaller boats have had difficulty passing through the west channel.
Jordan, whose property is on the northern end of Eel River near Madeline Road, said boats cannot pass at her end of the river, either. She added that the inability to use a boat on the water impacts her and her neighbors’ property values. Jordan added that the issue has been ongoing. She said she tried to bring it to the town’s attention in 2003, with no results.
Additional chairs were pulled out to accommodate residents at the Waterways Committee meeting.
Jordan asked if Chapter 91, the Massachusetts Public Waterfront Act, should apply to this issue. She asked the committee if the town was obligated under Chapter 91 to ensure the waterway is passable.
Resident William Erickson suggested that the original dredge project may require a second step in the process. “I’d love to see it dredged on one side or the other,” Erickson said. He added that green buoys placed by the town have been helpful, but not enough to navigate through the channel without scraping the sandbar.
“People are doing their very best, but they’re still hitting the bottom,” he said.
Erickson added that the soil composition has shown traces of silt, which cannot be redistributed on the beach.
Committee chairman Joseph V. Voci said dredged material needs to be redistributed where the material is compatible. For example, dredged sand can be redistributed onto a sand beach, but silt, which retains more water than sand, cannot be put onto a sand beach. The mixing of incompatible materials could have negative impacts on the environment, Voci said.
Voci said the issue is a complex one with no easy answer. He said that in addition to finding a place to redistribute the dredged material, environmental consulting, surveying, permitting and engineering reports need to be done, which is a time-consuming and expensive process.
Select Board member Douglas C. Brown, who was in the audience, suggested that the town return to the regulators who approved the dredging permit, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) and request that they remedy the “hangnail” that may have been made worse as an unintended side effect of the permit to dredge the entrance of Eel River.
“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Brown said.
While boaters and the Waterways Committee consider what action to take next, members of the committee agreed to visit the site on Eel River and see the hangnail for themselves.
In other business, the committee decided to table reorganizing the board until all members of the committee were present; Kevin King and James Tietje were not at the meeting.
