South Florida company offers ‘aquatic tractor’ as sargassum solution

A South Florida-based company says it is seeing an uptick in orders of its sargassum-clearing machinery which it says can clear 500 pounds of the seaweed a minute on the near-shore of beaches.

With predictions of larger-than-ever influxes of the seaweed in the region this summer, managers at Weedoo Boats say their phones have been “lighting up” with people trying to find solutions to the problem.

Bobby O’Shields, operations manager at the West Palm Beach company, said Weedoo has supplied its “aquatic tractors” to several countries in the Caribbean to deal with sargassum, including Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, Puerto Rico, St. Martin and St. Croix, as well as to resorts and contractors in its home state of Florida, “with more and more orders coming in”.

“We’re dealing with increasingly higher volumes this year than in the past,” he said.

Recent reports indicate that there are blankets of 13.5 million tons of sargassum floating in the sea, dubbed the ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’, which are likely to be carried on currents towards Caribbean islands, Mexico and South Florida.

Grand Cayman has already seen sargassum arriving on local beaches in recent weeks, along Seven Mile Beach and areas of West Bay and South Sound.

Weedoo’s Chris Sexton says the company’s workboats are ideally suited to removing sargassum. “It’s a little workhorse for oceanfront sites,” he said, as the machine’s compact size make it easy to launch directly from a beach and to maneouvre tight spaces around docks.

O’Shields says the machines are “essentially like a tractor on the water” that works on any type of waterway, including the ocean, canals or rivers, that needs to remove nuisance or invasive vegetation, rubbish or post-storm debris.

The company designs and manufactures the Weedoo Workboats, which it sells to municipal agencies, resorts or contractors for about US$100,000 each.

O’Shields says the boats, which have front loaders that pick up the seaweed or debris, are easy to use and can be operated by anyone who knows how to drive a tractor or boat. A training manual and video is supplied to purchasers.

He explained that each load the Weedoo picks up on its front loader can either be transferred to the shore where it can be made into piles that are then removed by other machinery or loaded onto a barge or larger work boats.

He said in countries where the boats have been sold, some are turning the collected seaweed into composting material and using it as fertiliser.

Cayman has tried various methods to remove sargassum from its beaches and near-shore sites, including an effort last year to use a pumping system to suck the seaweed rotting on the surface of the water by Garvin Park in West Bay.

The government says a multi-agency task force is working on a national response to the problem.