Nantucket anglers and visiting anglers are fighting one of the largest dredge-and-fill projects for so-called “beach nourishment” ever undertaken. The project will likely destroy world-class striped bass fishing grounds near the island.

The project’s “borrow area” (dredging site) is close to Bass Rip Shoal where six million cubic yards of sediment would be removed from the continental shelf, and then pumped and bulldozed onto Quidnet, Sankaty Head and Sconset Beach.

“The proposed dredging contour runs right inside the EEZ boundaries,” explained Capt. Josh Eldridge, who is fighting the project vigilantly.

“NMFS closed that area when the bass stocks collapsed, and we’re not allowed to harvest bass out there but they can dredge up the relic shoal despite the fact that it’s federally designated as Essential Fish Habitat, and for good reason.

“The glacial moraine outwash is exposed here and life clings to it,” said Eldridge, who grew up on Nantucket and has fished there for more than 20 years.

Capt. Bobby DeCosta has also been a vocal critic in public meetings, and reported that 20 of Nantucket’s approximately 30 full-time charterboats spend 75 percent of their fishing time off Sankaty Light.

“It’s the only place where we can take our clients and guarantee them fish to take home,” said Capt. Pete Kaizer. Kaizer had tried to work with the project sponsors, Sconset Beach Preservation Association, to design a less damaging project. But he says that he doesn’t feel that the sponsors or their consultants, Florida-based Coastal Planning & Engineering (CP&E), are operating in good faith.

“They’re telling me one thing and planning another,” Kaizer said.

The project opponents have good reason to be suspicious. CP&E has been responsible for several disastrous projects in Florida. In fact, it appears that CP&E is advertising one of their debacles as a tremendous success on the Sconset Beach Preservation Association’s website. We visited the Sconset beach preservation website, and to our horror we found photos of the Phipps/Reach 7 project, that CP&E undertook for the Town of Palm Beach, Florida, in 2006. The dredging silted over coral reefs, and buried extensive nearshore reefs. The material that was used for the project had little or nothing in common with the native beach sand and was so fine that it continues to erode rapidly, leaving giant escarpments, and lithifying into material that resembles concrete in texture. It was also full of fossil coral chunks. The contractor was supposed to screen out the rocks, but only screened a portion of the beach. More reef rubble is exposed after each swell.

And two years ago, CP&E set a most unenviable precedent: The clay and rocks they certified as beach compatible for St. Lucie County beaches was so far outside Florida’s pathetically loose compatibility regs that the county was forced to truck it off the beach and start the project over with real beach sand.

But about half the material had washed away or solidified, depending how high on the beach it was placed. The material that washed into the surf zone settled directly onto acres and acres of nearshore reefs, and two years later turbidity is still a chronic problem. The project destroyed local anglers’ sight-fishing opportunities for snook, jack crevalle and tarpon, and seems to have impacted pompano fishing.

In response, Florida Sportsman and Shallow Water Angler magazines published updates to alert the public, and the Surfrider Foundation went to St. Lucie County erosion administrator Richard Bouchard, promising to use its political influence and legal resources to stop any future St. Lucie County beach work unless he fired CP&E and hired a more environmentally responsible engineering firm. They were fired. But CP&E planned a massive project for Broward County using materials that University of Miami geologists say is mud, not sand, even though the last relatively healthy stands of elkhorn coral, a species listed as threatened, lie just offshore.

The Nantucket captains we spoke with are hip to the contractor’s poor performance record.

“I’ll rip my own business apart before I let somebody else do it,” said Eldridge. “But this is a fishery of national significance and we need help stopping them from destroying it just to give temporary protection to eight houses.”

—Terry Gibson