The new Cow Bay Marina, built by the City of Prince Rupert held it’s official ribbon cutting opening this past weekend with live music, free hot-dogs and soft drinks for those who came out.
This is an important piece of infrastructure for Prince Rupert, which has little water access at the moment.
“This is a huge deal for us, to repatriate the water front. Someone a few days ago caught a halibut off the dock. We will have itinerant vessels coming this summer. We were losing 2000 vessels each year, because there was nowhere for them to tie up. This should boost our economy in our peak seasons. Moving forward we are looking at doing more developments like this, east of Quinitsa, so there could be more access to the waterfront in the future,” Mayor Lee Brain said.
“It’s a nice sunny day, the band’s out here, the community hasn’t had something like this in a very long time. We had a lot of funding partners that came together to make this happen. The total bill was around $4-million and $2-million came from the federal government. We’re very happy about that.”
Marty Bowles Marina Manager was able to contribute on how the dock has already shown signs of being a success, and based on the many people who came to the opening.
“We have people down here everyday rain or shine, wind, you can’t believe it. I open it at six in the morning, and we have people at ten after six walking their dogs out there, and I’m shoeing people off at 11 p.m. We have had people travel from Prince George to come here because they’ve heard we opened it. They went to Cow Bay Cafe for lunch, they went out for dinner and got a hotel for the night. People are coming from far and wide to see the dock. I love the fact that this is open to the public, but we also have the second side of it that, which is the marina side of it, and we will be accepting boats at it that we wouldn’t normally take.”