As he puttered his boat past the docks and multimillion-dollar homes of Daniel Island, Gates Roll recalled an odd encounter with a new resident.
"(He told) me that I wasn't allowed to fish around his dock," said Roll, who owns and operates Tall Tide Fishing Adventures. "And I thought to myself, 'Well, a year ago, your dock wasn't here, sir, and you weren't either.'"
In Roll's view, the incident illustrates a clear trend: Docks are becoming more numerous along the edges of tidal creeks, sometimes making it more difficult to navigate and fish. And as the homes on Charleston's coast have grown in size and cost, so have the docks attached to them, he said. Once-simple piers stretching out to a modest platform with a tie-up point have been supplanted by large structures that include boat lifts, roofs and other additions.
Ralston Creek runs past homes on Daniel Island in Charleston.
"This is everyone's resource — a public trust resource," Roll said. "You put a dock in, and to me it feels like a private encroachment on a public resource."
Chris DeScherer, who leads the South Carolina office of the Southern Environmental Law Center, alleged that the permits dock owners submit aren't examined closely and are typically rubber-stamped by officials.
Dock owners in coastal waters — whether in Charleston, Beaufort or Myrtle Beach — need to meet design standards set by the state's Department of Environmental Services.
"SCDES encourages joint-use and community-use docks in lieu of private docks to reduce proliferation and environmental impacts; however, the agency can't prevent a waterfront property owner from pursuing a private, recreational-use dock," an agency spokesperson wrote in an email.
For large developments, the department requires a Dock Master Plan to prevent overcrowding and to protect coastal ecosystems. Daniel Island has such a master plan, a DES spokesperson confirmed.
Homes under construction on on Daniel Island in Charleston, Sept. 24, 2024.
An attorney for Point Hope, a sprawling project on the Cainhoy Peninsula that's currently the subject of a pitched legal battle brought by the law center and several conservation groups, also has implemented a master plan in its first completed neighborhood, an attorney for the developer said. DI Development Co. is responsible for both Daniel Island's development and Point Hope.
Rhett DeHart, the group's attorney, wrote that he's unsure whether the other Point Hope neighborhoods will have similar plans, noting that much of the new housing is too far inland for homeowners to have access to the water.
A critical mass of docks can cause ecological effects. A 2021 study from Massachusetts found that private docks can alter ecosystems by introducing new habitats for invasive species, altering and destroying marshland through initial construction and increased shading, and by introducing leachate pollution through chemically-treated wood piles and human activities such as the use of cleaning chemicals.
As new homes are built, so are protective barriers — and those can harm the shoreline, DeScherer said.
Sea levels in the region are set to rise about a foot over the next 25 years, and the marshes of coastal South Carolina will attempt to move inland to adapt. But too much development on the shoreline can lead to an effect called "coastal squeeze" — where the marsh gets stuck between a proverbial rock (rising seas) and a literal hard place (such as a storm-surge wall in front of a home). The critical ecosystem then gets choked out of existence.
"Cainhoy is one of the great remaining opportunities for marsh migration in this part of the coast," DeScherer said. "If these homes move in and armor the shoreline, the opportunity for marsh migration goes away."
That's an issue Charleston city leaders identified in the city's recently released Water Plan, which aims to guide Charleston through the next several decades of global warming and rising seas.
A few houses without docks have oaks growing near the shoreline along Captains Island on Daniel Island's Ralston Creek, Sept. 24, 2024, in Charleston.
"For development (on Daniel Island and Cainhoy) to continue without creating downstream impacts, the function of the natural system must be preserved," the plan notes. Wetlands play a critical role in capturing and controlling floodwater, something that will be increasingly critical as the Lowcountry is battered by a new generation of wetter, stronger hurricanes fueled by climate change.
On the recent outing, fisherman Roll puttered on in his boat. The flora and fauna of the Lowcountry's salt marshes unfolded.
A blue heron peered at him from a dock. Dragonflies flitted past. Cordgrass rustled in the wind.
And construction crews hammered away at new homes just off the marsh's edge.
