There’s a small sandbar that has brought up a great question of personal freedom versus the good of the majority.
Sandbar parties are all the rage. The Islamorada Sandbar which lies in sight of US 1 is packed on weekends and crowded on most days. It has a Facebook Page with 48,000 followers. I belong to several fishing groups on Facebook that often have requests for charters to the sandbar. There are now several companies specializing in just that.
The parties seem to have popped up everywhere there is shallow sandy bottom and even some places where there is none. In my Kurt Hunter Series, I have gone into the damage caused by thousands of feet on seagrass. Check out what I’ve written about that before here.
This time I’m writing about a different and unique and negative impact one of the sandbars is having: road traffic. There is a small sandbar located on the two-lane stretch of highway between Florida City and Key Largo called Bikini Beach where usually six to twelve boats and jet skis anchor for an afternoon of sun and sand. Sounds great, and they have every right to do that, though I don’t know what the appeal of hanging out fifty feet from the highway is. I’ve heard that this is one of the only places with sandy bottom around Key Largo, but the attraction is lost on me.
Why they’re here isn’t what this is about either. It’s about the traffic caused by their presence. The highway is one of two ways in and out of the Keys. The other, Card Sound Road, is longer and has a toll, though we often take it on weekends to avoid the traffic on US 1.
Congestion, as traffic jambs are now called is common on the two-lane stretch as it is through Islamorada and a couple of other sticky points on the through the Keys. It is often common to see a two-mile backup in both directions because of the sandbar. The problem is severe enough that the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) has just allocated funds to install a visual barrier along the stretch of highway.
Spending what will probably be at least six figures, on at first, privacy fencing and later trees and brush seems crazy to neutralize the consequences of a dozen boaters.
That’s what I want to talk about. Should the boaters be forced off the sandbar for the sake of hundreds of motorists, or should they remain and have their freedom to enjoy the sandbar result in a substantial cost to taxpayers.
My first reaction, because the problem affects me personally, was to get them out of there. Make it a no motor zone so they can’t enter. That’s wrong though. Though there are plenty of marine parks and restricted waters in the Keys, this isn’t one of them and there’s really no reason to make it one.
What about taking an alternate approach and relocating the sandbar. Why not artificially create a better place, a water park of sorts, where people can enjoy the sandbar lifestyle without affecting others. It seems counterintuitive to groom a section of natural wilderness, but these guys are here to stay and an effort needs to be made to accommodate them. It would seem to be a pretty simple operation. No roads, facilities, or parking are required. Just groom the bottom a bit and bring in some sand.
The Keys beaches, what there are of them, are built up by man. Both Sombrero Beach in Marathon and Smathers Beach in Key West are supplemented with massive quantities of sand to counteract erosion. Why not do this to a shallow area with boat access?
It’s an interesting example of the personal freedom of the few versus the good of the many. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
So....if I read this correctly, there are some people on the sandbar close to the highway and the backup is caused by motorists gawking at the people on the sandbar. The sandbar partiers are apparently in the right here...doing nothing but hanging out together. "relocating a sandbar" doesn't work any better than 'renourishing' a beach. The sand will not stay anywhere that the current, waves and tides don't already put it. I can go on about this for an interminable time, but googling "sediment transport" is easier for the reader. So, IMHO, if you don't want the Powers That Be to screw over the boating public yet again with more restrictions and you can't put in a man made sandbar like a man-made reef, you have to deal with the dumbass motorists that cause those wave-like traffic slowdowns because they've never seen people with a boat and a beer. Either put up a blind so they can't slow down, write a minimum speed ordinance and enforce it or (my personal favorite) charge a $500 users fee for non-residents to cross Jewfish Creek or the Monroe County Toll Bridge south of Jack's. . If the overcrowding doesn't get some relief, raise the fee til it does. (In an alternate universe we could have asked Ed Robinson to get Breeze Meade to blow up the bridge....) Wait....Trufante gets involved (by accident of course) with some terrorist group with a big damned bomb which, at the end of the story, blows up and wipes out the highway across Lake Surprise, thus moving the traffic bottleneck to Alabama Jack's. THey make a fortune selling lunch and beers to the people in the huge traffic jams as well as selling t-shirts that say "We almost made it to the Florida Keys" , traffic is reduced into the Keys, Trufante survives with the 1000 watt smile and the 15 watts of common sense and Steven Becker has another bestseller. The End
As Winston Churchill said: "It's a constitutional right, wrapped in a moral dilemma, inside a slippery slope." Well, he would have said that if he'd lived close to the Florida coast. I too, feel conflicted about the damage to our fragile sandbars and beaches. But, just as sure as I enjoy quietly flipping bait, or silently cruising on my paddle board, I also acknowledge that my fellow citizens have a right to get drunk, half naked, and sunburnt on a floating disco ball.
My only consolation is that, as all American fads do, this one too shall pass.