Ibzeman, no, I'm not kidding. There has been plenty of dredging over the past few years and the reef is still there. If dredging causes silt which causes reef damage then Hurricane Keith would have put paid to the reef in 2000 when THOUSANDS if not Millions of tons of silt and sand was deposited there......the wind blew sand and silt in that direction for 60 hours....the reef survived just fine. I would suggest that the storm probably dumped more sand every minute on the reef than man made dredging could produce in a century...and it's certainly not going to take the barge folk a century to dredge their channels. Mother Nature looks after its own. She took care of the reef just fine post-Keith.

I'm not suggesting there won't be some silt caused by the initial dredging but the argument that the reef will suddenly die just because one more channel (one of literally DOZENS on the East side of Ambergris) is dredged simply doesn't hold water. There has already been plenty of dredging on that part of the island...all well and good when it suited private property owners who want to put a 300ft dock with one side dredged out to bedrock so that they can bring in their 25ft skiff...where was the outrage then? The answer, none was required, this kind of activity is well tolerated by nature.

That said, there needs to be another solution to this problem. I doubt the barge operators will be able to function adequately in the rainy season that far south of town when the roads disintegrate. It's going to be tough for them to supply the demands of the island when the rains are bucketing down.