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The layout of Hilton Head Island can be a subtle mystery to outsiders. For someone like Claire Morda, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, the concept of gated communities seems a tad stuffy.
Morda is among the group of residents and visitors who had trouble reckoning why an island surrounded by pristine waters and pockmarked by creeks and streams was known less for its boating and more for its golf and tennis.
Morda latched onto this concern after she married in 2000 and took up part-time residence at her husband’s home in Windmill Harbour. Through friends at the South Carolina Yacht Club, she fulfilled a lifelong goal of learning to sail. She was instantly hooked.
“There’s a wonderful feeling when you’re in a sailboat and you’ve got some wind, and it’s you and the ocean and the sky and the wind. There’s no noise from a motor or anything,” Morda said. “It’s the calmness, the peacefulness, the fact that it’s you and the elements.”
After that, Morda learned about the effort, led by a coalition of Hilton Head sailors and rowers, to establish a public center for non-motorized boating. The push to create the first such facility for Hilton Head would plug a gaping hole in the island’s amenities, supporters say. It would also pay homage to its history with the native island community by offering a picnic area and access to the waterway for fishing and shrimping.
But the effort stalled over the years as the town and supporters kneaded plans to address the reality of location, funding and logistical issues.
As of July, a compromise for a scaled-down rowing and sailing center was in the works, with the town pledging to clean up the site and rebuild the dock, while the evolution of the site would be left to the rowing and sailing community. Based on the latest estimates, a facility could be open by 2012, if all goes well. Morda may be a part-time Hilton Head resident, but her dedication to public waterway access is a full-time passion.
When on the island, she gets onto the water often: once a week for racing her Harbor 20 and one or two other times just to sail. She’s also part of a sailing club in Manhattan — a kind of club that arose to address similarly underused resources of the city’s rivers, she said.
The sailing and rowing center idea predates Morda’s involvement by a few years, when members from the Palmetto Rowing Club, Carolina Sailing Center and other recreational boaters began lobbying the town to create a public water-access point. They drafted plans, organized supporters and brainstormed fundraising ideas. The town created a committee to look into the project, and several sites were considered before they settled on the current site on Squire Pope Road on Skull Creek at the location of the former native islander seafood coop.
But this year, the original grand plan — which included refurbishing the dock and constructing a building that would include classrooms, boat storage and other space — proved too costly. The main problem was the site itself: the dock on the 2.4-acre property is in bad shape, littered with debris and neglected. Estimates for repairing or removing it caused the costs to jump from an original cost estimate of $1.5 million to more than $2 million.
Morda was asked to join the eight-member board of the directors for the project two years ago because of passion for boating, and a New York aggressiveness handy in wrangling stalled negotiations.
“She’s a very strong-spoken woman, with very good ideas,” said Luther Strayer, a member of the Palmetto Rowing Club who’s been pushing the project for years. “She really wants to get this thing off the ground.”
Morda, Strayer and others consider schools a key component of the plan: students could use the site for training, regattas or recreation. The facilities schools currently use under the Old Oyster Factory restaurant are unimpressive. They’re cramped, aging and inaccessible at low tides.
The supporters of the project are working on a scaled back, lo-fi version of the original vision. In other words, the boaters are saying, just let us have a sturdy dock and a place to launch. They’ll work out the rest over time.
“Put in gravel, grade it, tear down the dock, rebuild the dock, let us get up and running,” Morda said. “Whatever it is just to have the access.”
Several boaters have agreed to donate time as coaches. Fundraising has come up short of the $1 million goal, but the idea of progress breeds hope.
“Without a site, people are unwilling to contribute. It’s like a dream in someone’s mind, it’s not reality,” Morda said. Money to buy boats and build storage facilities will have to come in time.
But with the town on board to help fix up the site, supporters expect the rest to fall into place.
“It’s hard to get somebody to lay down a few thousand dollars if it’s just a gleam in your eye,” Strayer said.
