Boats Get Sailing Orders : Emory Cove Live-Aboards Fight Eviction From South Bay Mooring

They are the cast-outs of Emory Cove, a bunch of boat people who have anchored their craft in the quiet South Bay harbor for years, sharing the salty air and breathtaking scenery with their more affluent neighbors in Coronado Cays. Monday they are being evicted.

The houseboat residents, nicknamed the Mud Ducks of Emory Cove, are a mixed bag of people bound together by their independence and love of solitude.

There’s a paraplegic living on a disability pension and dependent on his floating neighbors to fetch some of the necessities of life.

There is an elderly couple who work with missionary zeal to help the Mexican poor in Baja California.

There’s a Vietnam vet who ekes out a living for himself, his wife and three kids by cutting hair at the Navy Exchange at $1.50 a head. He has taken a week off from his job so that he’ll be on hand when the Harbor Patrol boats arrive to tow his boat out of its safe harbor.

There’s a retired couple living aboard a nondescript World War II sub-chaser complete with a machine shop that turns out aircraft parts. Their relative affluence compared to other Emory Cove live-aboards allows them to rent a slip for their dory and maintain a telephone in a Chula Vista marina. But they can’t keep their craft there. It doesn’t meet marina requirements.

The heavy in this scene is the San Diego Unified Port District, which is evicting the 40 or so Emory Cove inhabitants from their quiet paradise. The agency has passed the proper ordinances, has given the proper (31-day) legal notice and has created another free anchorage site elsewhere for the boat people in Emory Cove.

The new anchorage is not a quiet harbor at the shallow south end of the bay. The new site, called A-8, is an unprotected 80-acre anchorage across the bay near National City’s busy Navy docks and a commercial marine terminal. It is separated from the shore dock by a deep-water channel traversed by oceangoing ships--a factor the small boaters view as a major safety hazard.

For months now, the Emory Cove contingent has seen the end to their comfortable solitude approaching. Complaints have been lodged against them for littering the Silver Strand shoreline with their trash and polluting the waters with their waste.

Accusations of drug abuse have been lodged against some of the boaters. Yet, a spokeswoman said, tests of the cove waters show no pollution, and trash that accumulates around the cove comes from “midnight dumpers” who arrive by car, not boat. Coronado police have hassled them recently, they claim, ticketing their cars parked along the shoreline in a spot approved for parking by port officials.

So when the eviction notice came last month, delivered by Harbor Patrol boat, it took no one by surprise. Bay live-aboards have been on the Port District’s hit list for some time and have been shunted from more visible sites in the northern reaches of San Diego Bay to the less desirable sites to the south. Emory Cove inhabitants realize they are not high on the list of preferred bay tenants.

Port spokesman Dan Wilkens defended the agency’s actions as an attempt to restore order and safety where chaos now reigns. Emory Cove, despite its quiet appearance, is not a safe harbor, he said. It is too shallow for safe navigation, and contains unmarked shoals and sunken derelict vessels. It is far removed from necessary emergency services, which the Port District can provide in the upper part of San Diego Bay. When the Emory Cove contingent moves to the open waters of the new mid-bay anchorage, they will find that they are in safer waters, Wilkens said.

The presence of the boat colony in Emory Cove also poses a threat to nearby nature preserves and waterfowl sanctuaries, he said, and contributes to the pollution of the shallow South Bay area.

The ordinance that requires the Emory Cove live-aboards and other maverick boat people to relocate goes into effect Monday, but Wilkens stressed that port officials are not going to pounce immediately on the live-aboards. The Port District staff will meet Tuesday, he said, to decide how to proceed against any boaters who fail to move to the newly designated anchorages of their own accord.

Rumors have spread like waves through the water community--that the Harbor Police would arrive en masse at dawn Monday, cut anchor lines and tow the motley houseboats out to the new anchorage across the bay. Some of the craft are barely seaworthy; several have no engines or sails to make the trip on their own.

So Emory Cove residents have passed the hat and hired Imperial Beach attorney Larry Croyle to make an 11th-hour attempt to obtain a restraining order against the Port District’s enforcement of its eviction notice. Croyle did not complete his legal filings Friday and will return to court Monday to plead his case and get a ruling.

Many of the live-aboards have given up on efforts to change port officials’ minds about the safety of Emory Cove and the lack of safety at the newly designated anchorage off the Sweetwater River channel, but Coronado activist Judy Collins isn’t about to quit.

Collins and her husband John, a retired Navy captain, have a boat of their own in which, one day soon, they plan to live and to tour the world, or perhaps just hang out in some safe harbor.

Collins has crusaded for the Emory Cove live-aboards with the Coast Guard, the Port District, the Harbor Police, Coronado officials, the area agencies for the homeless and anyone else she felt could right the wrong she believes is being done.

After all, if they can evict the Emory Cove “mud ducks,” she reasons, “who’s to say the rest of us won’t be next?”

She contends that if the homely assortment of floating homes is uprooted, the close-knit community will disintegrate. “The public agencies don’t want more homeless street people, more jobless, and that’s what they’ll get if they move this group out of Emory Cove,” Collins said.

There are youngsters living there, going to school on shore. There are retired couples and Vietnam veterans and young people who don’t have enough money to rent an apartment and live on land, Collins said. There are sick people and handicapped people who must be able to get medical aid quickly. Break up their community and there’s going to be trouble.

Collins isn’t campaigning for a long-term solution for the Emory Cove residents. She is trying to buy them time until they can find another safe harbor they can afford elsewhere.

“Why not let them stay, at least until there is another use for the area,” she said. “They aren’t hurting anyone where they are and they would be willing to pay something. They aren’t asking for charity. Just for a safe harbor.

“I just keep thinking that any of us who use the bay are just one regulation away, just one price hike away, just one refusal away of being in the same boat as the people in Emory Cove.”