Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ross Petten is my name. I'm from Port de Grave. I've been on the harbour authority for a number of years. I had a call just this morning to ask if I'd like to attend, so I'm not prepared very well. I'll try to do the best I can under the circumstances.
We have a good harbour in Port de Grave. It's a man-made harbour. We've done a lot of work on it over the last ten years. A lot of money went in there, in excess of $10 million, I believe, to be exact. It was a nightmare of a harbour, what we had there originally. It had a different opening. We changed it from coming eastward from the open sea to westward into the harbour.
Really, for the type of harbour we have, we've got a lot of costly boats. We have a bigger-sized fleet of boats, I guess, than mainly what's around the rest of the province. You'll see some of the largest types of boats in Port de Grave harbour. I would say the average cost is over $1 million for most of the boats. We have some smaller ones, but not many. Our main size of boat is 65 feet long.
We have washrooms and facilities for all our boats. We also accommodate a lot of boats when they come in from other communities, especially tie-up time in the winter. We have them from all around the island. We have them there from Labrador and everywhere.
When we built our harbour, there was a lot of blasting. A lot of work went on. We also got so many floating docks there for the smaller-type boats, the pleasure craft. We also accommodate some pleasure craft there also.
But I guess no matter how big your harbour is, you never have it big enough. There's no way to accommodate without a lot of people getting along very well together and being able to move around and let people off-load, let people tie off outside of each other. The big thing is cooperation, I guess, in any of these things, but there's always a job to be done. We're always after money to extend or add on or build on. We'd like to also be considered, because for our harbour we're always trying to have extra walls and we're always trying to get floating docks.
Also, we're a volunteer sector. I'd certainly like to see more funding come in that area, so that you could help train people. Some of these applications and some of these other things you're into now are really out of our field. It takes a lot of work. And it's a lot to expect volunteers to be doing, to be honest with you. I think you should be looking at putting more funding into these areas of work.
That's about all I have to say. Thank you.