The $10 million dredge of Wildwood’s back bays is half finished. Will boaters find clear sailing by Memorial Day?

Scott Reeves guided a boat out of Bunkers Marina in Wildwood on an unseasonably warm day last week on his way to board a dredge vessel anchored in Post Creek, part of the Shore’s back bay network.

Once aboard, Reeves, a mobile dredge operator, demonstrated how he uses a phone app to guide a large, jagged-toothed ball like a video-game monster gobbling up sediment along the bottom. The rotating bit is attached to the front of the dredge and scoops muck from the bottom in 25-foot arcs, as sand and water gets sucked through a 14-inch pipe. The app shows depth in precise, color-codes.

The sediment gets filtered for glass, shells, and discarded fishing gear, such as hooks and nets.

“We find a lot of trash,” Reeves said.

Among the oddities dredged up so far: a sunken boat in Ottens Harbor and the tire off the rear axle of a 1920s-era Ford.

Since November, crews from West Chester-based Mobile Dredging & Video Pipe Inc., have been working on a $9.7 million dredge of what’s known as the Wildwood Channel Complex, a series of waterways that run through Wildwood, North Wildwood, West Wildwood, and Middle Township, all in Cape May County. Crews have worked over nights in frigid cold and whipping winds for the project managed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

In all, crews will have dredged about 4.5 miles, and scooped 125,000 cubic yards of sediment, when the project is complete in coming weeks.

Joselyn Wall, a maritime engineer for the department of transportation, explains that the channels are basically maritime roads owned by the state and need to be kept safe for traffic. The goal is to dredge the channels to between 5.5 feet and 12.5 feet at lower tides, making them more navigable for recreational boaters, commercial vessels, and fishing and shellfish operations. A commercial boat can draw a 10-foot draft, she noted.

Docks and waterfront restaurants also depend on boating traffic.

Though there were not widespread reports of boaters getting stuck, Wall said the depth was simply getting too low in some areas. The area was last dredged in the 1970s.

“There were some of channels that only had about two or three feet of water in certain places,” Wall said. “It’s kind of like snowplowing roads. It’s our job to clean up all the shoals and try to make it as consistent as possible for boaters. Say you want to take your family out on the water and you leave at high tide. A couple hours later, you’re going to come back at low tide and you might have a problem.”

A significant amount of the sediment, she said, is sand shoved in by Superstorm Sandy more than 11 years ago and swished around by tides and storm surges ever since. The project is run by the DOT’s Office of Maritime Resources. The DOT anticipates Sandy-related grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Seven waterways are being dredged: Post Creek, Beach Creek 1, Beach Creek 2, Ottens Canal Channel, Ottens Canal Lagoon Channel, Ottens Harbor Channel, and West Wildwood Channel.

As the dredge continues, Wall cautions that boaters navigating the channels should remain alert for pipelines, buoys, dredges, and other equipment.

The slurry of sand and water sucked up by dredging vessels is pumped into giant, mobile, multistory tanks for “dewatering.” The dried material gets filtered. The resulting fine sand gets pumped into acres of Geotubes, which are large polymer bladders that can store tons of the dredge material. Remaining water is drained from the bags through tiny holes like a colander, producing what’s essentially damp beach sand.

Once filled, the Geotubes are sliced open, and the sand is scooped out by heavy equipment. Trucks cart the material to “beneficial use sites.”

One prime location is the Wildwood Back Bay Landfill on the waterfront and rimmed by freshwater wetlands off Post Creek. It’s a known raptor foraging area. Municipal waste was dumped at the landfill from the 1930s to 1970s, rising to 15 feet. About 10,000 cubic yards of dredge spoil will be spread on top of the landfill as a cap, or used for grading the location, at no cost to the city, raising the height to 17 feet.

Wildwood’s plans call for the property to be landscaped and a walkway installed, with a “living shoreline” of natural material used to stabilize the site.

Some of the approximately remaining 25,000 cubic feet of material might be used at the Heislerville Wildlife Management Area in Maurice River, Cumberland County.

Genevieve Clifton, executive manager of the Office of Maritime Resources, said all dredge material are tested for an “enormous list” of metals and chemicals before being spread on land.

“All material has some level of contaminant, some just naturally occurring” Clifton said. “All of our material is tested. The majority of the Atlantic Coast material, 90% or more, is what we would consider clean material and it can go almost anywhere. We can use it in all sorts of applications.”

Clifton said the dredge was carried out over winter because of the low vessel traffic, and to avoid major impact to aquatic life, such as on breeding seasons for fish and crabs. The goal is to have the dredge, which is about halfway finished, complete by Memorial Day, she said. But it’s likely to be done by mid April.