When you hear about the meticulous efforts to now save and protect places like Tintamarre it makes one wonder how they can get away with the wholesale destruction that they carry out elsewhere in St. Martin on most days.
I walked Orient Beach this AM - from Club O to the big pock-marked rock by CoCo Beach the one that looks like a scale model of the moon.
They had a full size Hyundai front loader and John Deer tractor tearing up Orient Beach from beyond the waterline (about a foot or two into the sea), to about 70 feet inland. It had rained a time over night and the sand was clumpy and the tractor rake was clogged and was really acting as a plow. They dug into quite a stretch of Orient Beach from just before Bikini Beach, over La Playa beach and a little beyond Waikiki mostly. There were points were they seemed to be digging down 4-5 inches. All to remove the relatively small amount of seaweed that had come in overnight. They pile up their plowed mixture of seaweed and sand into huge piles at each end of their excavation. These piles are now quite long and get maybe 3-4 feet high.
I’m no Oceanographer, but a complete moron could see that this is so shamefully shortsighted and reckless of them!.