A proposed North Manitou Island dock is treading water before it’s built. Whether from the vantage point of a backpacker, history buff or taxpayer, it’s becoming obvious that engineers designing the dock and Great Lakes captains who will place the safety of their passengers in its care need to iron out their differences.
May we be so bold as to ask for a timeout? First we offer kudos to the National Park Service, which owns North and South Manitou islands, for recognizing the irreplaceable value of the Manitous to Leelanau County. The south island, with its god-engineered natural harbor, was settled in the late 1830s as a fueling stop for schooners. North Manitou followed about a decade later after easily-reached South Manitou wood was harvested.
Both islands have rich histories that were entrusted to NPS care after their purchase by the Department of the Interior. And both are in need of new docks to ensure continued and reliable ferry service in the decades to come, with North Manitou in a dire condition.
We were encouraged when Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore allocated all of its $32 million share of the Great American Outdoors Act toward island projects, with providing safe passage to North Manitou the keystone piece. It will likely be the most expensive of all island projects, and one of the priciest undertakings in the 54-year history of the Lakeshore.
Of late, though, our accolades are fading. Because of its design decades ago, the current NPS-built dock requires dredging, often annually. That didn’t occur in 2020, resulting in a lost season of visitation, and again in 2023 when the dredge didn’t arrive until most of the summer season was in the books.
Rather than dredge this season, the Park Service built an extension from the North Manitou dock into deeper water. The temporary dock is of a free-flow design, allowing waves to roll under its deck — and, according to captain Jimmy Munoz, to push into the side of the venerable Mishe Mokwa ferry boat. Munoz and Mike Grosvenor are the primary ferry captains.
Munoz, who has been taking passengers to the islands for 31 years, deems the docking system unsafe to the point that Manitou Island Transit service has not run to North Manitou all summer. What a waste.
It gets worse. The proposed North Manitou new dock, for which bids are expected to be awarded this week, employs the same open-water design. We normally would applaud the NPS’ desire to eliminate expensive dredging. But not at the expense of reliable visitor access to the island.
MIT makes a valid point when it argues that the ferry service must make definitive promises for drop-off and pick-up times to island visitors. Under most wind directions and speeds, the new docking system will discourage visitation because of a high frequency of cancellations, MIT asserts.
Now the owners of MIT are questioning their futures, which is a shame. They trace the Grosvenor family lineage to 1917, when patriarch Tracy Grosvenor established regular mail service to the islands. Finding a replacement ferry service would be difficult considering limited dock space available in the Leland Harbor.
There’s a lot more to the story, all of which, hopefully, will become part of the regular news cycle.
Attorneys from the feds, which gave written notice that the ferry contract is in default, and MIT are talking. Is that good or bad?
We’ve learned for sure that ferry boat captains are not engineers, and engineers are not ferry boat captains. We might add that the folks who write newspaper editorials are neither, so don’t expect us to determine right — or perhaps more in the right — and wrong in the North Manitou dock design.
But we are good at shedding light on public policy problems. One is building in the Manitou Passage.
