Wenley Ferguson, restoration coordinator with Save the Bay, shows some of the worms that are food for striped bass living in the eelgrass.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

NEWPORT

The coolers are dropped on the sand, the canopy is pitched in the bright sunshine and the kayaks are dragged to the water’s edge.

But instead of a beach party, it’s time to work.

Half a dozen divers gripping trowels and mesh bags wade into the perfectly calm surf at King’s Beach, plunge underwater and swim off in different directions. In shallow waters less than 50 yards offshore, Sarah Sylvia finds what she’s looking for — an eelgrass bed so thick and so tall that as she digs out a handful by the roots, the blades virtually envelop her in a cocoon.

“It’s kind of freaky,” she says.

She and the other divers fill the bags with eelgrass, return to the surface and wait for a kayaker to paddle over and trade the filled bags for an empty one. The bags are then brought to shore, dumped into baskets and carried over to the canopy. There, a band of volunteers painstakingly separate the individual shoots into groups of 50, tie them together and put them in a cooler lined with a saltwater-soaked bed sheet, keeping them alive until they can be transplanted elsewhere the next day.

Bill Prescott, of North Kingstown, crosses out the number 200 on a piece of paper on the cooler cover and writes down 250. The goal over two days: 12,000 shoots.“Back to work,” he says.

On this late summer morning, nearly two-dozen volunteers join the staff of Save the Bay in a seven-year-old effort to transplant eelgrass from a few selected ocean beds to Narragansett Bay. Long ago, eelgrass thrived in the shallows of the Bay and its surrounding waterways, including the Providence River, the Palmer River, Greenwich Bay and Hundred Acre Cove. But pollution, dredging and boat propellers have taken their toll.

“We used to have thousands of acres of eelgrass,” says Wenley Ferguson, the environmental group’s restoration coordinator, who noted that now there are only about 300 acres, most of them in the lower to mid regions of the Bay, where water quality is better.

While bathers may find eelgrass about as appealing as seaweed or jellyfish, the sea vegetation provides a rich habitat for marine life. Worms, snails and crabs and juvenile fish thrive in the hidden and shadowy waters of eelgrass beds, while predatory fish such as striped bass are attracted by the favorable odds of grabbing a bite to eat. Eelgrass beds are also attractive nursery grounds.

NEARLY 90 PERCENT of the eelgrass beds that once thrived along the East Coast have died off in the past 70 years, according to some estimates. One study shows that nearly half of the beds have perished since the 1970s.

Save the Bay began addressing the restoration of degraded marine habitats in Rhode Island in 1995, including aerial mapping of the Bay to help assess its health. In 2001, another study identified the sites most suitable for restoration.

Among the types of projects that were undertaken were building fish ladders to allow migratory fish to return to historic spawning grounds blocked by dams and restoring tidal flow to salt marshes choked by roads and historic filling.

The eelgrass efforts, which began in 1996 but got under way in earnest in 2001, have met with some success, but also a fair amount of heartbreak.

Early eelgrass restoration, led by the University of Rhode Island, involved planting seeds using a gelatinous mixture spread by a machine. While the effort produced seedlings, predators dined on them and limited the program’s success. Another early method involved getting schools around the state to germinate eelgrass in saltwater tanks for eventual transplanting, which proved too difficult.

In 2001, eelgrass was planted at 19 test sites. The following year, 3 of the most successful sites were selected for large-scale transplant efforts, financed by a multiyear contract with the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. One was off Tiverton’s Fogland Point. The site showed great promise for two years, but in 2003, a year that saw low oxygen levels and fish kills in the Bay, much of the eelgrass died off from a variety of causes, including extensive algae growth on the blades, says Ferguson.

“We gave up the site,” she says. “It shows eelgrass restoration is very challenging.”

Today, if 50 percent or more of the eelgrass transplants survive, that’s a “successful transplant,” Ferguson says.

For a few years, URI had an eelgrass mariculture operation, the first in the nation. It grew eelgrass from seed to be transplanted in the future. But Environmental Protection Agency financing for the project ended.

Apart from the 290 acres of eelgrass inside the Bay, there are 14 acres of eelgrass in nearby waters, some off Sakonnet Point but far more off King’s Beach.

“This is the largest eelgrass bed in Rhode Island,” says Ferguson on the day of the harvest.

Currently, Save the Bay strives to transplant about 110,000 shoots every year from donor beds. Of the total harvest, 60,000 shoots go to Portsmouth’s Coggeshall Point, 40,000 to Prudence Island and 10,000 to Hog Island. A handful of test sites, including Greenwich Bay, receive about 200 shoots which, like a canary in a coal mine, will help determine whether improvements in Bay water quality will one day make then suitable again for eelgrass.

Ferguson looks forward to the day when major sewage plants that empty into the Bay proceed with their plans for tertiary treatment, which reduces levels of nitrogen. Nitrogen and other nutrients contribute to undesirable seaweed growth and algae blooms, which deplete oxygen levels in the Bay. Meanwhile, sewer work in recent years in Warwick should help reduce polluted runoff.

WHILE SUCCESS is anything but guaranteed and the work can be tedious, there’s no shortage of volunteers this morning at King’s Beach.

They gather beneath the canopy in small groups, sit on coolers around baskets of harvested eelgrass and stick their hands into the pungent vegetation, hoping to avoid crabs and sea worms. Some bite, most are simply slimy.

“The worms I’m trying not to look at,” said Melissa Reyes, 37, of Coventry, whose company, Blue Cross & Blue Shield, pays her for up to eight hours a year of community service.

“None of us likes to get to the bottom because we don’t know what’s there,” says Eileen Shaw, sitting across from her.

It’s a family affair for the Shaws. Kaitlyn Shaw, 24, of Cranston, recently took a job with Save the Bay and is out in the water with the dive suit that was her college graduation present. Meanwhile, her mom, Eileen Shaw, of Katonah, N.Y., and grandmother, Doris Judge, of Cape Cod, gather and tie bundles of 50 eelgrass shoots with the roots all pointing one way, so they can be easily replanted. Sister Erin helps dump eelgrass brought in by the kayakers into baskets to be emptied in the seemingly bottomless containers in front of the volunteers.

“She asked me if I would come to volunteer,” says Judge. “I said yes. I didn’t know what it was all about.”

She’s pleased that she came and turned it into a Newport vacation.

Bill Prescott, who has always enjoyed fishing and boating, has been volunteering for seven years, taking part in both the early- and late-summer seasonal eelgrass harvests.

“I was retired and looking for things to do. It’s nice to give back to the Bay,” he said. “I meet a lot of nice folks, people who are interested in the Bay.”

The harvest will continue for another day, but by the following day, several days of transplanting will begin. Divers will board a boat at Save the Bay’s waterfront headquarters in Providence and motor down to the west side of Prudence Island.

ON ANOTHER DAY, Ferguson stands on the Portsmouth shoreline at Coggeshall Point, just north of the Melville marina district. A Save the Bay boat anchored nearby bobs in white-caps whipped up by a brisk northerly wind. Eelgrass has been transplanted here for three years in a row. Each time, divers stir up the sediment, stick clumps of eelgrass roots into the holes and support the shoots with pieces of bamboo that will eventually decompose.

“See those buoys,” says Ferguson. “Those are the markings of the transplants.”

In addition to harvesting and planting, Save the Bay staffers visit sites to gauge the success of past transplants. On this day, about six divers go into the water to count eelgrass shoots in different sample spots. Each buoy marks a year’s transplants.

“They’ll monitor all three years,” Ferguson says.

The number of eelgrass transplants is somewhat deceiving in trying to convey the size of the beds that are being started in the Bay.

“It sounds like a lot of transplants — 20,000 shoots — but this is a three-year effort,” says Ferguson, gesturing to the relatively small Coggeshall site.

The counts will also take place at the test sites, those barometers of the Bay’s health.

“We’re hoping to see a large improvement in the Bay in the next ten years,” she says.

“We are hoping that line where eelgrass can survive will move northward.”

rsalit@projo.com