In January 2024, a Beaufort Water Search and Rescue volunteer named Patrick Canning stood up at the city's Strategic Planning Retreat and told council members what anyone who launched a boat at Pigeon Point already knew: the dock was failing. The city agreed. The landing went on the Capital Projects List as an "emerging priority," and by March 2025 a contractor called O'Quinn Marine had a temporary fix in the water while the city worked out a permanent one.
That permanent plan is what has kept this small neighborhood watching city hall for the better part of two years. It has now surfaced in a specific, numbered form, sitting in a state permit application that most residents have never seen. The short version: the parts of the plan people hated are gone. The amount of new concrete going into the water is not smaller. It is close to double.
The Plan Nobody Asked For
The first conceptual design, unveiled in the spring of 2025, tried to do a lot at once. It called for a floating dock and kayak dock added to the existing pedestrian and fishing dock in Roger Pinckney X Park, a new 100-foot boat dock built perpendicular to the original, and a fence running around the embankment.
Pigeon Point residents did not receive it well. During public comment, one neighbor described the design as a blueprint to "completely eradicate any sense of place" from what she called a very, very residential landing. Others pointed out that the scale looked less like a neighborhood dock and more like Whitehall Landing, one of Beaufort's busiest public boat ramps on the other side of the Woods Memorial Bridge. The parking math bothered people too. The plan added exactly one new space, which raised the real possibility that Christensen Park, a few blocks over, would absorb the overflow on busy weekends.
City Council listened. Mayor Phil Cromer closed out that May meeting by thanking the neighborhood for showing up, and directed the project's engineering firm, Davis & Floyd, to come back with something that better matched the size of the place it was meant to serve. A revised concept was slated for the city's Capital Projects Workshop that August.
The Number Nobody Expected
What came out of that revision, and what is now in front of state regulators, is not a smaller landing. It is a differently shaped one, and the ramp itself tells the story.
| Current ramp | Proposed ramp | |
|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | 12 feet by 97 feet | 15 feet by 152 feet |
| Surface area | 1,164 square feet | 2,280 square feet |
That is roughly a 96 percent increase in concrete ramp surface, close enough to double that it is fair to call it that. The width grows by three feet and the length by more than half again, which matters at low tide when the current ramp already runs short for larger boats, a complaint that shows up in boater forums discussing this landing specifically.
None of the objections raised in the spring of 2025 were about the ramp's footprint. They were about the fence, the extra dock, and the parking. Which means the piece of this project that grew the most is the piece nobody argued about in public.
What Got Dropped, and What Took Its Place
The two most visible flashpoints from the original concept are gone from the current filing. There is no fence around the embankment. There is no separate 100-foot perpendicular dock jutting into the river.
In their place, the permit describes two distinct water access points instead of one oversized one:
- On the main river side, the existing dock gets an 8-foot by 135-foot floating dock, with a smaller 10-foot by 20-foot floating dock and two kayak launches attached as a courtesy dock for general users.
- On the Pigeon Creek side, a modest pierhead extension leads to a 6-foot by 36-foot aluminum gangway, down to its own floating dock and kayak launch.
Splitting access this way spreads foot traffic across two smaller structures rather than concentrating it on one large dock, which was the specific visual residents objected to when they compared the original plan to Whitehall Landing. It is a real compromise. It is also not the same thing as a smaller project.
The Part Nobody Debated in Public
Buried in the same permit application is a piece of shoreline work that never came up in the community meetings covered by local reporters. The city plans to remove 596 cubic yards of existing riprap and install 687 linear feet of new bulkhead, 6 feet high, backed by 450 cubic yards of fill, all for shoreline protection along the critical area. An 18-inch outfall pipe and riprap apron handle stormwater at the same time.
That is nearly a tenth of a mile of new bulkhead along Pigeon Point Creek and the Beaufort River, work driven by erosion control and drainage rather than the aesthetics that dominated last year's public comment. It is the kind of detail that only shows up when you read the actual permit filing rather than the meeting recap, and it is arguably the most consequential change to the shoreline itself, even though it drew no visible pushback.
Where Parking Actually Stands
Here is the honest gap. The critical area permit governs construction in and adjacent to the water: the ramp, the bulkhead, the docks, the outfall pipe. It does not speak to parking, the issue that worried residents most after the fence and the oversized dock. Whether Christensen Park still ends up absorbing overflow traffic on a busy Saturday is not answered by anything in this filing. If that piece was resolved at the August 2025 workshop or afterward, it has not shown up in the public record alongside the water-side plans. For a neighborhood built around narrow residential streets, that is the loose thread still worth watching.
What Happens Next
The state held its public hearing on this permit application on April 7, 2026, at Beaufort City Hall, and kept the written comment period open through April 21. As of early September, no final decision had appeared on the project's public page at SCDES, and the city has not announced a construction start date for this phase. The clearest way to know when that changes is to check that page directly, since the department has committed to posting its final decision there and notifying anyone who asked to be on its mailing list.
The playground next door already went through its own version of this. It closed for construction in the spring of 2025 and reopened with new equipment months later, a smaller preview of the patience this landing will likely require. The full story of how residents organized around this project, including the neighborhood association that formed specifically to track it, is worth reading if you want the fuller timeline.
What is clear now is that Pigeon Point's pushback did shape the outcome. It just did not shrink it the way most people probably assumed. The fence and the oversized dock are gone. The ramp got bigger anyway, and a stretch of new bulkhead nobody debated in public turned out to be part of the deal all along.
If you are the kind of neighbor who has been following this landing since Patrick Canning first raised his hand in 2024, you already know how much local process shapes what a place like Pigeon Point looks like ten years from now. That is the same lens Lloyd Williams brings to every corner of Beaufort he works in, whether the conversation is about a bulkhead permit or a front porch. If you want a longer look at what makes this stretch of the river distinct, our neighborhood guide to Pigeon Point covers the rest of it. Let's Connect if there's ever a Beaufort question, water access or otherwise, we can help answer.
