The foreshores here are now owned & managed by the parish council on behalf of the parishioners of Aveton Gifford for recreational use of the river, and the council will provide free annual permits for residents in this parish who wish to keep rowing boats and dinghies here. In the past these areas have been used for the illegal dumping of old boats & fly tipping, so in the interest of ensuring they are kept free, unauthorised or abandoned boats will be removed, and if not claimed, the parish council reserves the right to dispose of them.
Notices will be posted on all of the boats on the Tidal Road foreshore, and photos of them will be posted up on the Aveton Gifford Facebook page – by responding to these you will have a chance to let the council and parish clerk know which is your boat. Please use this email address to get in touch with him – agpcclerk@gmail.com by 21st July 2019 and once you have let the parish council know that you want to keep a rowing boat or a dinghy on a mooring here, you will be able to register your boat free of charge.
To register your boat you will have to sign a very basic agreement form, and you will also need to provide a photo of your boat so that it is easy to identify it (There may be a few that look similar, and a photo will remove any doubts!) You will be allocated a numbered mooring post that will be for your own use only, for one boat. All of this is free of charge, and you will also get a sticker to place on your boat which will show the year it has been issued (Registrations will need to be re-issued annually).
The parish council is going to put up more mooring posts, and will spread them out further along the foreshore so that there should be less chance for boats to get damaged, or mooring lines impossibly tangled. Once we know how many posts we will need, we can get these new moorings installed.
There are two things that we need boat owners to do please. The first is a condition to always moor your boat fore and aft – the best solution would be to use a stern anchor. This helps to stop boats ending up on the Tidal Road after having been blown the other side of the mooring post on a high tide, and it also helps to stop boats bumping into the one next door – both meaning there is much less chance of your boat being damaged. Also, a lot of the foreshore here is Secondary Saltmarsh, and this is ecologically important for carbon capture. The parish council can use it for moorings, but we do have to minimise damage there – if you use fore and aft moorings you will limit the amount of grass and ground under the boat which will be worn away.
Secondly, each mooring will have only one boat allocated to it, and if other boats suddenly appear tied up to your post, it will give a chance to try to track down an owner or to see if it has blown upriver on a high tide. We hope this will mean that we can deal with extra boats straight away, and this should be a much better way of keeping our moorings and foreshore clear, so please let us know if it happens.
Dom Webb has taken over responsibility for looking after these moorings, so if you need to contact him, you can reach him on seckls74@gmail.com