Margaret and William Sovey bought their marshfront property on Sea Island more than a quarter century ago, enthralled by its view of unspoiled saltmarsh.These days, they have to crane their necks just so to preserve that vista. On a recent hot, sunny morning, Margaret Sovey, 84, stood near a bank of windows to demonstrate. “I sit at the kitchen table, and I just look straight out. I don’t look this way anymore,” Margaret said, pointing south toward half a dozen over-700-foot-long dock walkways that slice through a raft of green marsh grass to Village Creek. “And you know, my blood pressure goes up every morning when I look out that window, and I see these docks and boat houses. It just galls me to have to look at this, and have this little bit of waterway left,” said the German-born Margaret, who along with her husband, a native of Hartwell and a Georgia Tech alumnus, moved into their custom-built house in 1996.
“And then these people contacted us and wanted to build a dock as well,’ she said, referring to her next-door neighbors. “Now that would go right smack in the middle of that little bit of water that we can still look at and see little boats go by and all of that.”That next dock could be even more obtrusive than the existing ones. Georgia officials have proposed new regulations for private recreational docks in Coastal Georgia that, if approved, could double the size of dock walkways, by allowing them to be 6 feet wide and cover more than a tenth of an acre of marsh. And that’s just one of the changes the new regulations would allow. The public can comment on those regulations until July 24. The DNR Board of Directors is expected to vote on the regulations at its August 25 meeting.
