VENTURA : Dredge Sends Ocean Floor to the Beach

On a calm day, the Headway sat flat, just outside of Ventura Harbor, vacuuming sand off the ocean floor, pumping it through a mile of 16-inch steel pipe that wound back into Ventura Harbor, then across the shore and north onto Pierpont Beach.

On-board, the daytime crew of five dredge gypsies who follow work from job to job sauntered from one shipboard post to another, keeping the engines pounding and the pump sucking sand.

Up top in a glass-enclosed room sat lever man Gerry Unger, coolly working the control switches that keep the hydraulic suction dredge in place and pumping 15,000 cubic yards of sand every 24 hours.

Conversation was at a minimum. Powerful diesel sounds and smells filled the air around the crew.

“There’s not much you can do out here but work,” yelled Dutra Dredging Co. Superintendent Gregory Holder, making himself heard over the racket.

Seasoned boaters here are only too happy to endure the low rumble of the dredge for several weeks each year. Ventura Harbor, like many man-made harbors, depends on dredging to keep its floor from silting over and its entrance from turning back into beach.

This year the dredge removed about 200,000 cubic yards of sand from in and around the notoriously tricky harbor entrance. In other years, dredgers have removed three times that much from throughout the harbor.

The Headway did double duty this year, returning sand to a section of Pierpont Beach that had been stripped away when one of its protective jetties failed.

Grateful residents there, seeing Holder approach, came out of their oceanfront houses to aim broad smiles at him. After a year of waves lapping at their walls, they were finally getting a stretch of beach between them and the surf again.

But in his business, heroism is a fleeting thing, Holder said.

Just last week, residents were using other words to describe the dredge crew when the Headway was forced to temporarily halt pumping sand onto the beach in fear that it might disrupt the grunion run.

The Headway finished its task last week. It remains moored in Ventura Harbor throughout the year.