SUNDAY STORY:Mud wrestling

When John Garrison wants to take out his sailboat, he first must ask one question: Is the tide high enough?

Garrison’s 50-foot sailboat drafts nine feet, which means he needs the water to be at least that deep to keep from hitting bottom. He’s dredged under the dock at his Harbor Island home, but sometimes he can’t take the boat much farther.

“In front of my house, I have to wait until there’s a three-foot high tide until I can go out of the channel,” he said. “A lot of people that don’t know the bay, like people from out of town, they run aground.”

The problem isn’t just Garrison’s — it’s all around the harbor. The detritus of 70 years of runoff and erosion — an estimated 900,000 cubic yards of silt — has filled in the channels and drifted under docks until boaters can hardly get around.

The answer is dredging. With the major dredging project in the Upper Newport Bay well underway, Newport Beach city officials want to focus next on the lower bay, which some worry is close to being nonfunctional.

“It’s something boaters, environmentalists and residents all want,” City Councilwoman Leslie Daigle said. “People are really concerned about it being safe and navigable.”

City officials have drawn up a plan to dredge the lower bay, and they’re in talks with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the $4.1 million needed to get the work started. But one thing stands in the way: some tiny crustaceans called amphipods.

For Newport Beach, dredging is essentially a constant battle to keep the bay and harbor from becoming a giant mudflat and, eventually, a meadow.

The harbor was created in its current form in about 1919. While there has been dredging under individual docks and in a few select spots, the only comprehensive dredging since the harbor was built was in the 1930s, according to city data.

The main channel was designed to be 20 feet deep, and in some places it now measures 10 feet, said Seymour Beek, a member of the city’s harbor commission.

“The effect is that some boats are going aground in places where they shouldn’t be going aground because a lot of the bay is silted up,” Beek said. “People have to plan ahead when they’re going to move their boats — they can’t move them certain places in the bay at low tide.”

This year is the second time a regatta held by First Team Real Estate and Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, which ends today, has had to construct temporary docks outside the harbor because some of the boats entering the race are too big to come in.

“In 2005 we had the same issue,” said Jake Rohrer, director of general fund development for the Hoag Hospital Foundation. “If the harbor were dredged and we could accommodate those boats without a temporary dock, that would be ideal.”

The city is ready to dredge and in fact wants to tack the lower bay project on after the work in the upper bay, since the dredging equipment is already here and it’s expensive to transport.

Officials are pursuing funding from the Corps that’s left over from projects that never happened — money the Corps will lose if it’s not spent this year.

“We’re almost entirely ready,” Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff said, expect for the little problem uncovered by the amphipods.

Amphipods are shrimp-like crustaceans that live in sand or under water in the sea. They’re used to check for toxicity in dirt and sand that’s dredged.

“You throw them in a fish tank and you throw the sediment in with them and see how long they live,” Kiff said.

In Newport’s tests of material from the lower bay, the amphipods died, Kiff said. The problem was traced to a pesticide called bifenthrin, which is commonly used to get rid of ants and roaches.

Bifenthrin is such a recently discovered problem, it isn’t even on the Environmental Protection Agency’s radar yet, so there are no standards for it, Kiff said. But it still makes disposal of lower bay sediment difficult.

The pesticide toxins break down when exposed to air and light, so now the city hopes to prove this will make its sediment safe to be dumped at an EPA-approved site off the coast of Newport Beach.

While the city works out issues of funding and toxins in the soil, boaters like Garrison will have to keep timing their sailing trips to fit the tides.

As the harbor gets shallower, dredging has become an imperative, not just for boaters but for businesses that depend on the waterfront and for the city whose reputation is based on it.

“It’s reached that point where people have really started to look around and say, ‘Is the viability of the harbor in question now?’ ” Kiff said.