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05/05/2020 02:00 PMHarry Ruppernicker, Jr., whose parents, Harry Sr. and Marguerite Ruppenicker, opened Harry’s Marina in 1965, was surprised on a late-April Thursday afternoon when he rented the marina’s last available slip.
970 Harry’s Marine Repair, Inc., known locally as Harry’s Marina, is a small, family-owned marina on the Patchogue River in Westbrook offering 76 slips for pleasure vessels ranging from 12- to 45 feet in length.
Boating, in the face of the coronavirus, has become “our last remaining leisure activity,” Ruppernicker said.
It’s hard to feel gratified by this turn of events, though, he explained.
“A lot of friends and neighbors are hurting right now,” said Ruppenicker. “There are people out of work and who are worried about their businesses closing.”
While the marina business is good, it is still subject to additional, COVID-19-related restrictions. Governor Ned Lamont, together with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, earlier this month announced their aligned policies affecting marinas and boatyards.
“Marinas, boatyards, and marine manufacturers...will be allowed to open for personal use as long as strict social distancing and sanitization protocols are followed,” Lamont announced in a press release. “Chartered watercraft services or rentals will not be allowed, and restaurant activity at these sites must be limited to take-out or delivery only.”
The restrictions allow for a certain amount of interpretation, however.
“[N]o decisions have been made about which marina amenities will be closed,” Ruppenicker said. “We will follow all local, state and [federal] recommendations and guidelines.”
Harry’s offers its members a covered pavilion for gatherings, a yacht club, and a club house.
Clinton’s Cedar Island Marina, located on Long Island Sound, has also experienced a boost in rentals, with slips for smaller and larger vessels sold out. Midsize slips are still available, said owner Jeffrey Shapiro, who has been in business for more than 45 years.
“We have rented more slips at this point in time than we had last year at this point in time,” he said.
Shapiro noted that boating is one of the remaining recreational activities that favors social distancing.
“[B]oats are a good place for a family to get together as a sequestered unit and be able to get out of the house and go somewhere,” he said. “And still be able to maintain their privacy or their quarantine or sequestered status.”
Cedar Island Marina offers a number of amenities, including a restaurant and a club house, which is available for members to rent out for special occasions. It also has a pool and hot tub that typically open after Memorial Day weekend, though all those plans are currently in limbo..
“So we’ve still got another month to go,” Shapiro said. “We’ll get it ready, but we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
For now, the marina’s weekly emails remind members of social distancing requirements, Shapiro said. Signs are posted at the marina entrance, at the head of every dock, at the fuel dock, and at other locations.
And employees remind members in person, he said.
“We’ve let people know,” he said. “If you read the paper, you see that there have been businesses, golf courses, that have been shut down. There’s a statewide hotline that if people see large groups of people congregating, you can report them.
“We’ve been pretty diligent,” he continued. “We want to make sure that we do maintain our status.”
Travel Restrictions
The Town of Westbrook, which rents out 14 moorings on the Patchogue River, has already rented 11 of them for the season, according to John Rie, chair of Westbrook’s Harbor Management Commission. He noted that aside from having a slip to call home, boaters require places to go—and that raises some complicated issues.
“There’s a lot of questions about how people are going to use their boats,” said Rie. “[S]everal people are thinking about not putting their boats in this year because they can’t go anywhere,” a boat dealer told him.
Rhode Island, a popular destination for Connecticut boaters, is requiring any traveler to the state to quarantine for 14 days.
“If you want to do a harbor in Rhode Island, [you’re required to] stay away from the shore for 14 days,” Rie said. “Put a quarantine flag up” and remain in your vessel.
A recorded message on the Block Island Harbors Department office number confirmed this.
Rie and his wife, Deborah, had vacation plans that the health emergency has caused them to abandon.
“We were planning on taking our boat up the Erie Canal this summer and right now it’s closed,” John Rie said. “[T]here’s a question as to whether it will open at all” this season.
New York State had planned to open the waterway to through-traffic on May 15, but concerns over the coronavirus led it to defer planned maintenance and construction, according to an April 23 announcement by the New York Canal Corporation. Parts of the canal might be open on a “regional basis” at a later date, the announcement said.
The Ries’ trip might also have taken them up the St. Lawrence River up into Canada, but that plan is no longer feasible. Transport Canada has issued posters that warn recreational boaters: “Planning on Boating Across the Border? DON’T.”
“There is a temporary restriction on all non-essential travel at the Canada–U.S. border,” the poster’s text reads. “All non-essential travel, including tourism and recreation, is prohibited.”
A number of marinas around the country and beyond are open to local boaters but not to transients—those who need to dock just for a night or two. Some fueling stations are also closed. Sites such as waterwayguide.com provide marina and service updates for recreational mariners planning travel.
Hard Times
Some with recreational boats are finding themselves without jobs and with no means not only to rent a slip, but to store the boat on land. There’s been at least one case of an owner asking Cedar Island Marina to sell the boat that’s stored on its property, according to Shapiro.
Fortunately, he said, this situation “hasn’t been widespread,” he said.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Ruppenicker.