Hervey Bay Gossip

Not a chance!

While the thought that Hervey Bay might host the America’s Cup is one that’s exciting let’s face some reality here … it’s never going to happen. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic we are nor how hard Councillor Nioa says she is going to work to make it happen … the fact is that it won’t and the reason was mentioned on last night’s news.

The America’s Cup boats are 27.43 metres wide … the opening that they would have to sail through to get into the Urangan Boat Harbour is 24.38 metres wide. That means that for the America’s Cup boats to be able to access the marina the opening would have to be widened by a minimum of 6.10 metres.

Widening the entrance would have to be done very quickly … in a matter of weeks because the boats and teams would begin arriving within three weeks of the final decision on the venue being made.

So there’s the problem … even if the Fraser Coast Regional Council could get off their collective posteriors and do the work in that short period of time – something that’s never been known to happen before … there’s still a little matter of environmental impact studies and a myriad of other bits of red tape that would have to be overcome.

Perhaps instead of latching on to pipe-dreams like having the America’s Cup sailed in Hervey Bay our councillors might be better employed in doing some real work to overcome the problems Hervey Bay is facing … many of which are of their making.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.