The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A potential “model” for the Government’s fledgling national moorings strategy yesterday warned it was vital such facilities are “regularised and standardised” given the importance of boating tourism.

Catherine Booker, secretary for the Elizabeth Harbour Community Partnership (EHCP), told Tribune Business in the wake of the now-aborted Bahamas Moorings deal that proper management and placement of such facilities is critical for preventing “over-crowding in our most beautiful spaces” due to the presence of multiple visiting vessels.

EHCP, which was created more than a decade ago in 2012, has installed and oversees some 64 “eco-friendly” moorings in George Town, Exuma’s Elizabeth Harbour, with a further 37 placed by the Bahamas National Trust (BNT) due to the overlap with the Moriah Harbour Cay National Park.

If done correctly, Ms Booker told this newspaper that fees charged to visiting boaters for use of these mooring fields can be a vital source of revenue for financing other harbour management initiatives, ensuring these facilities’ upkeep and maintenance, and injecting a potential new earnings source into local communities.

“I think the Elizabeth Harbour Community Partnership model is one way to basically keep the positive economic and ecological benefits in a community,” she said. “I think there’s room for private moorings but there should be standards for what those moorings look like so no issues arise. 

“The moorings are stable, don’t create environmental damage, are managed properly, maintained and, if it’s possible, some of the revenue generated goes back into the community. There are a lot of municipalities in Florida that have their own mooring facilities. It could be something that’s managed by government. It’s a good idea to create partnerships where there’s a group with the capacity and authority to manage.”

The Government and Bahamas Moorings last week “mutually agreed” to terminate a deal where the latter had signed a 21-year lease to rent 3,645 acres of seabed from the Crown covering 49 mooring/anchorage sites in the Exuma Cays. This, in effect, would have privatised all the best mooring sites in the island chain by handing them to a company granted a monopoly.

The deal was scuttled after the parties likely realised it would not stand up to private scrutiny. The Prime Minister’s Office’s deputy director of communications witnessed the lease on behalf of a company, Bahamas Moorings, in which her husband was a principal and doing a deal with her employer. And many of the key figures involved with Bahamas Moorings have long-standing links to a key government adviser.

The Government subsequently moved quickly to unveil its national moorings strategy in a bid to likely distract attention from the Bahamas Moorings fiasco. As part of this, it is initially seeking to develop an inventory of existing moorings facilities; who owns and operates them; whether they are foreign or Bahamian; and if they have the necessary government approvals to do so and are compliant with all relevant taxes.

“I think it’s a very valid model from both an economic and environmental perspective,” Ms Booker said of moorings facilities. “The BNT has been using moorings to generate revenue streams for many years now successfully, and the EHCP has only recently entered into this space but been able to get up and running having done its homework ahead of time and learning lessons from previous attempts.

“That’s helped us to make sure we’re doing things properly, managing the moorings and keeping them maintained. Moorings are a great tool for managing the capacity of an area, making sure there isn’t over-crowding in an area from a user-tourist perspective, but if they are done properly and include an eco and environmentally-friendly system, they can protect habitats.”

Ms Booker said the EHCP and BNT have installed environmentally-friendly “eco” mooring systems that do not employ anchors and chain links, which devastate seagrass meadows, coral reefs and other habitats when they drag on the seabed. The sediment stirred up by such systems also reduces the amount of light in the water and negatively impacts its quality.

Instead, moorings are anchored by a pin that is drilled into the seabed causing minimal environmental impact. “I think the importance to yachting and cruising tourism i n The Bahamas is critical,” Ms Booker said of correctly-situated and managed moorings. “That’s a very important segment of tourism.

“It’s really important that The Bahamas moves to regularise and standardise what a mooring operation looks like. Whether that’s the type of system that’s privatised, it’s making sure whatever company comes forth has the experience and has done the proper planning. All that plays a role in ensuring the integrity in our tourism product that we bring into the country.

“Not everywhere needs to have moorings, but I think there are a lot of areas in The Bahamas, particularly places that receive a lot of boating traffic and which are highly concentrated, where it’s important to use moorings to create a new level of service. People like being on moorings, and it’s making sure there is not over-crowding of our most beautiful spaces.”

EHCP, in a statement, said that - “after only” the first year following the installation of its moorings in October 2023 - it was “able to use excess revenue to organise and sponsor fees for ten local aspiring captains to complete a basic vessel safety and chart-plotting training required for obtaining a captain’s licence in Exuma”.

“Fast forward to early 2025, and the due diligence and hard work of the EHCP and BNT have resulted in the successful implementation of reliable, eco-friendly mooring fields that are engineered to specifications, that do not cause damage to the seabed habitats where they are installed, and financially support efforts to take care of natural resources and enhance sustainable tourism,” the EHCP said.

“The EHCP is working towards a moorings programme model that creates a revenue stream for operations, but intends for excess revenues beyond operational and maintenance expenses to go to improving harbour safety, improving harbour amenities, and tackling the issue of waste management in the harbour. These goals are stated in the organisation’s mission and steps toward these goals are detailed in a strategic plan...

“The organisation continues to engage with a local pump-out boat entrepreneur and the Water and Sewerage Corporation to advance planning for a wastewater treatment facility that could handle boat sewage. The EHCP plans to release an annual report soon to include financial information and provide guidance for others who are considering a non-profit model.”