BALTIMORE — Chuck and JoAnn Anderika were up before dawn Tuesday to bring their sailboat back home.

The Anderikas set out around 6 a.m. from Solomons Island, headed for Baltimore. The couple wanted to ensure they made it in time to take advantage of a one-hour window for recreational boats to pass by the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and into the harbor, where they have a slip.

“We were afraid to miss it,” Chuck Anderika said.

The Anderikas’ boat was among nearly two dozen to pass the Key Bridge Tuesday evening using an alternate channel that had previously been accessible only to commercially essential vessels and those helping to clear the wreckage around the bridge. Recreational boats had been unable to enter or exit the harbor since a container ship struck the bridge on March 26, sending it into the Patapsco River. Six construction workers died in the collapse, which has also hampered traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore.

Tuesday’s opening for recreational boats was a one-time trial run, for now. Sailboats, yachts and other vessels were allowed to travel out of the harbor between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., and into it between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Seventeen recreational boats passed through the Sollers Point Alternate Channel in the morning, and 23 used the channel in the evening, according to the Key Bridge Response Unified Command.

Though the Coast Guard has not announced another opportunity for recreational boats to come and go, local marinas are hoping they will. Tuesday’s passage came after a meeting between Unified Command and marina leaders, who explained the impact of a closed harbor on their business.

“There’s a whole ecosystem built around the marinas,” said Paul Sanett, the chief commercial officer for Oasis Marinas, which manages nearly half of Baltimore’s boat slips. “There’s restaurants, there’s bars, there’s shops.”

For Wayne Easton, a marina is home. Easton is the dockmaster at Anchorage Marina in Canton, where he also lives aboard a boat.

Tuesday evening, he headed toward the Key Bridge site, a 5-mile trip by water from Canton, to greet the Anderikas and other returning Anchorage Marina slip-holders. The day was clear and bright, but windy. Occasionally choppy water grew choppier as boats streamed past the bridge shortly after 6 p.m., leaving waves in their wake.

There were power boats, yachts and a catamaran. There were at least three sailboats, including the Nanny Kay, which the Anderikas brought back to Baltimore after spending the winter in Florida. The couple was in Hampton, Virginia, making their way back up the Atlantic coast, when they heard the channel would be open on Tuesday. They decided to high-tail back to Baltimore, powering through three 10-hour days of travel in a row.

“Usually we would have taken four or five easy days,” said Chuck, “but all of a sudden it was, Tuesday you need to be here at 6.”

The Anderikas, who live in Pennsylvania but spend many of their summer weekends boating around Baltimore and the Eastern Shore, made it to the bridge by 1 p.m. on Tuesday, hours before the channel was slated to open to recreational traffic.

They weren’t the only ones to get there early. George Robertson, another Anchorage Marina customer, arrived around 3 p.m. on his Marine Trader trawler, Graceful. Robertson’s boat had been docked at Herrington Harbour in southern Anne Arundel County. He had been planning to bring it back to Baltimore the day of the collapse.

Passing through the channel, so close to the ruins of the bridge, was a surreal experience.

“I followed it everyday online,” Robertson said of the collapse, “but to see it at that point, it was worse than I thought. I can’t believe it came down so easy.”

“It was devastating,” said JoAnn Anderika. The trip to the bridge from Solomons Island was an unnervingly quiet one, absent the ship traffic that would normally be traveling to and from the port.

At the bridge the Anderikas found a busier scene. Boaters lined up their vessels as they waited to enter the channel. Once on the other side, the line became a hodgepodge, with boats racing toward a long-awaited homecoming.

Easton watched for boats he recognized as they passed through. He waved as Robertson’s trawler approached: “Hey George! Welcome home.”

With 547 slips, Anchorage Marina is the largest in the city. Robertson said he knew of four boats returning through the alternate channel Tuesday evening. He planned to meet with the Coast Guard Wednesday to share feedback on the first passage for recreational vessels.

Marinas in Baltimore have banded together to advocate for more frequent openings of the channel. Many boaters store their vehicles on land during the winter, often in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, and bring them back to the harbor in April.

Baltimore marinas are also a landing place for transient boaters traveling up and down the East Coast and to the Midwest. Easton said Anchorage Marina often hosts snowbirds headed north from Florida, as well as “Loopers,” who gather provisions in Baltimore before setting out for a trip through the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and on to Florida.

“Of course, we won’t be able to accept those reservations” without access to the harbor, he said. “Everybody wants to know when it will open, and we have no ideas.”

The Army Corps of Engineers hopes to restore access to the port by the end of May. Sanett, the chief commercial officer at Oasis Marinas, said the Coast Guard has been sympathetic to the strain on marinas in the meantime. He estimated the local marina industry would lose $1 million a month under the current conditions, a figure that doesn’t include the ancillary effects of reduced traffic at waterfront bars, restaurants and shops.

“This is not just a bunch of wealthy people wanting to play with their yachts in Baltimore harbor,” Sanett said. “When the bridge came down, there was a huge impact.”

Oasis, a management company for some 50 marinas across the United States, operates about half of the approximately 2,300 slips in Baltimore, including those at Lighthouse Point in Canton, Harbor East Marina, Baltimore Inner Harbor Marina, Port Covington Marina, Baltimore Yacht Basin, The Crescent Marina and Living Classrooms in Fells Point.

Baltimore marinas stand to lose out on longer term business the longer it takes to restore access to the harbor. Sanett said he’s heard of other marinas asking stranded Baltimore boaters to sign annual contracts rather than allowing short-term storage and slip extensions.

That was the experience of Brian Ward, who hired a Coast Guard captain to pilot his yacht through the channel Tuesday and to a slip at Lighthouse Point. He stores the boat in Dundalk, east of the Key Bridge, and called marinas on the Chesapeake Bay to inquire about temporary options after the collapse.

“I was thinking I could rent a slip in a marina for maybe a month or two months, but I didn’t have any luck,” he said. “Their prices are really high, or they wanted a longer term commitment, so I didn’t pursue that anymore.”

Ward will have to cancel a planned trip to St. Michaels for a wine festival in late April because of uncertainty about whether he will be able to leave the harbor again in the near term. But the Frederick resident said he’s glad to have his boat back in Baltimore, where he enjoys spending weekends on the water.

“July and August are the heights of the season, and I’m just hoping they’ll get something worked out by then,” he said.

Baltimore marinas plan to reach out to city, state and federal elected officials to see what opportunities exist for financial relief.

“This is a COVID-like event for marinas, unfortunately,” Sanett said. “The big focus has been on the Port of Baltimore to date, and rightly so. There’s nothing yet for marina owners and other businesses.”

Sanett said Key Bridge salvage workers want to avoid rubberneckers and joy riders going to peer at the wreckage, but they recognized the implications of a closed harbor. Representatives for the Unified Command did not respond Wednesday to questions about future channel openings.

“They listened,” Sanett said. “We’re hopeful it will happen again.”

In the meantime, Robertson said he and his boat will be staying put, for now, after the trip back to Baltimore.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

_____

©2024 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.