October 27, 2009
Marina manager Brad St. Coeur’s job is a puzzle. Each day he and dockmaster Mike Voelker draw little yachts on the marina map at Sunrise Harbor Marina in Ft. Lauderdale.
“The only way to do this is to hand-write it,” St. Coeur said.About 2,500 linear feet of dockage is divided among four docks at this Westrec marina on the Intracoastal Waterway a few miles north of Port Everglades. The docks range from 100-420 feet and with dockage on both sides, the configurations seem limitless.Each day a reservation changes, yachts say they need to board on the starboard side instead, or they may need the deeper dock. There are constant adjustments, St. Coeur said from his office overlooking a waterway busy with fishermen, tugboats, water taxis, visitors in the nearby state park and Sunrise Boulevard’s bridge.“It is a challenge to fulfill all the yachts’ needs and maximize revenues at the same time,” he said. Aside from each yacht’s individual needs, they must consider inside water depth is 7.5 feet and the controlling depth at the ICW is 9 feet.St. Coeur and Voelker run through a list of questions with each captain before the yacht arrives to give their plans a head start.St. Coeur grew up on Cape Cod and spent two years with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. As second mate on a research vessel, St. Couer traveled to the Azores, Bahamas, Caribbean, west Africa, Galapagos and transited the Panama Canal. Later, he was a captain on a yacht in Cape Cod and managed three marinas between 1985-1999.Most recently, he was dockmaster at Harbour Towne Marina in Dania Beach, Fla. With his training as a certified marina manager, Westrec moved him to Sunrise Harbor Marina to focus on the needs of megayachts.The marina was built in 2001 and especially caters to larger yachts. As yachts have gotten longer and more sophisticated, it has necessitated upgrading the electrical systems on the docks; but the builders planned well, St. Coeur said, because the power was in place and only the receptacles needed to be upgraded.He is a past chairman of the board for the Clean Marina Partnership of Florida and continues as a committee member. He got all Westrec marinas certified as Clean Marinas. Harbour Towne Marina was the first to be Clean Marina and Clean Boatyard. St. Coeur has also been a past chairman of National Marina Day and he is on the editorial board for Association of Marina Industries for the 2010 International Marina and Boatyard Conference.But the activity he feels most proud of is helping create Helping Hands of Harbour Towne, a charity that raises money for a child in South Florida with a life-threatening medical condition. Each year the marina hosts a fishing tournament, and in the past few years has presented the children and their families with more than $39,000.“We have had the children come to the events we had for them and later we have lost them,” St. Coeur said. “It is very emotional, but it is so rewarding.”
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