On a sunny Sunday morning at Anchor Marina on the Maurice River, Bob Myers Jr. sits in the shade of a small white building, overlooking a line of boat slips.
The marina is on a bend near the mouth of the river, just out of sight from the Delaware Bay, on a slip of land called Matt’s Landing. Myers grew up in Heislerville, a community of a couple of hundred families nestled close to the marsh between the river and the Delaware Bay.
As planned, the project will create a channel 7 feet deep and 150 feet wide across Maurice Cove to the river’s mouth, then a 100-foot-wide channel of the same depth to the fixed bridge upriver at Millville, a distance of about 24 miles.
The work can’t come too soon for Ken Whildin, the mayor of Maurice River Township in Cumberland County. Heislerville is a section of the township, which spans more than 95 square miles between the river and the border of Cape May County, with Millville to the northwest.