KEKAHA — Capital improvements at the Kikiaola Small Boat Harbor are gaining momentum. By the end of this week the contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps will be finishing dredging the harbor entrance. Beginning Sept. 1, the state will
KEKAHA — Capital improvements at the Kikiaola Small Boat Harbor are gaining momentum.
By the end of this week the contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps will be finishing dredging the harbor entrance. Beginning Sept. 1, the state will take over the project and oversee the dredging of inside the harbor.
Community members traded information with federal and state representatives at a meeting Monday evening at the harbor, hosted by the Army Corps and the Department of Land and Natural Resources, and mediated by state Rep. Roland Sagum, D-16th Distict.
Westside fisherman Glenn Mossman said Kikiaola Harbor was becoming too dangerous for boaters to utilize it.
“The channel entrance was shallow, which created a lot of swells,” said Mossman, adding that someone could end up capsizing.
If the situation was not improved, the harbor may have been shut down, said Mossman, who is also president of the Kikiaola Boat Club. “It was getting to that point; a lot of people were damaging their boats.”
Army Corps Project Manager Sharon Ishikawa said the contractor, Kiewit Pacific, reconstructed 835 feet of the main breakwater, which now is about three- to four-feet taller, has larger stones and a flatter slope, to provide better protection from crashing waves.
“We also rebuilt the 245-foot tip of the west breakwater,” Ishikawa said.
The Army Corps part of the project was also responsible for dredging a 700-foot-long, 205-foot-wide entrance channel. The channel does a 90 degree turn, narrows to 105 feet at the entrance of the harbor, and then it narrows to 70 feet inside the harbor. The whole channel will be 11 feet deep.
The Army Corps part of the project was 80 percent federally funded and 20 percent state-funded.
American Marine Corp., sub-contracted by Kiewit Pacific to do the channel-dredging, should be finishing up by the end of this week. On Sept. 1, American Marine, this time in a direct contract with the state, will start the second part of the project, entirely funded by the state.
This next phase of the project is scheduled to last until February 2010, and will comprise dredging the inside of the harbor.
The dredging of the harbor will reach a 7-foot depth. But DLNR Engineering Branch Head Eric Yuasa said the dredging will only remove soft bottom from the harbor. If they hit hard bottom, that portion will be left undisturbed.
Many community members attending the meeting were glad the project is only a few months away from completion.
“You guys have done a phenomenal job,” one of the fishermen told government officials at the meeting, adding that there are a lot of things they should be commended for, including acquiring funds, choosing the contractors, and managing the project timely.
Sagum reminded everyone that U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawai‘i was largely responsible for lobbying and acquiring funds for the much-needed project.
There was, however, one thing that, according to local fishermen present at the meeting, is stirring a lot of problems — a missing finger.
The finger, or spur, a 150-foot-long breakwater, was originally set in front of the harbor’s entrance, creating an inverse bottleneck for boaters coming in from the ocean.
Army Corps Coastal Engineer Tom Smith said that after several studies, including computer models, they decided on removing the spur.
Smith defended the spur removal, saying the project envisions usage for the harbor for the next 50 years. The wider entrance design is supposed to accommodate larger vessels.
Now, less than a year later, the boat ramp is filled with sand, creating hazardous loading conditions. Local fisherman Clayton Kuga said each swell brings in more sand.
“That finger was not supposed to come off,” he said.
Local fisherman Greg Holzman said community members down at Kekaha are asking the fishermen, “What did you guys do at the harbor?” The sand at Kekaha Beach Park is now mostly gone, he said. “It’s now Kekaha Rock Park.”
Holzman added that all the eroded sand could have been a coincidence, but it was rather strange that such a wide stretch of beach disappeared shortly after the spur was removed.
Without the spur, even a moderate swell sends waves bouncing off the west breakwater, and into the harbor, creating dangerous conditions inside of what was once a calm and safe haven.
“When the swell happens to come from that particular direction, we have waves in here that can be called legitimately a foot and a half,” Holzman said, pointing to the harbor’s entrance.
The waves created by the bounce-off make it “pretty much a two-man job to get your boat on your trailer,” Holzman said, which can be quite dangerous.
Another fisherman said he had two flat tires last week as a result of the bouncing waves and the sand build-up at the ramp.
Holzman said the missing spur has created such unsafe conditions that boaters cannot leave a boat unattended for 15 minutes without the fear of having the cleats ripped off.
The fishermen also said that the spur served as a protection for boats going out. During larger swells, they could hide behind the spur and wait for a window of opportunity to get out. Despite the wider channel, they said it has become more dangerous now to get out of the harbor.
The fact that the main breakwater is about three-to-four feet taller didn’t make it any easier. Holzman said boaters could watch the ocean and time the swells. Now it’s impossible to do that because of the added height on the breakwater.
Despite the general dissatisfaction with the finger removal, everyone was pleased with the project overall. The community members at the meeting asked that their local knowledge be taken into consideration in monitoring changes at the harbor.
Smith assured them that the harbor improvement is a “50-year project” that has just started. The Army Corps will continually monitor the area each year, to make sure it is safe and viable. He also said he will take all suggestions into consideration.
Everyone is invited to a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the harbor, happening at 10:30 a.m. today.
For more information, contact Sagum at 652-9811, Yuasa at 587-0122, Smith at 438-0581, or Joseph Borden, from the DLNR Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation, at 245-8028.
