A kayaker paddling past Quidnessett Country Club on Narragansett Bay noticed something that hadn’t been there before — a stone wall, 20 feet tall and two football fields long, standing on a public shoreline. No permit. The club had watched its signature 526-yard par-5 14th hole crawl toward the water for years — the coast there has surrendered about 50 feet in three decades — asked Rhode Island for a seawall back in 2012, got denied, tried giant sand-filled “burritos,” and lost them to the 2022 storms. So one quiet winter, up went the wall. The attorney general’s word for it: “willful, reckless, or wicked” — not something you usually hear on a par 5.
The catch is 363 years old. Rhode Island’s constitution, descended from a royal charter King Charles II granted in 1663, guarantees the public’s right to the shoreline — to swim, to fish, and, in one of law’s great specifics, to gather seaweed. And every seawall protects the land behind it partly by shoving the water’s energy at the unarmored shore next door; your wall can quietly become your neighbor’s erosion. Underneath the comedy is a property-risk lesson worth keeping. As a general planning principle, if you own something the ocean wants, defending a coastal asset is now its own standing line item: read your policy for what it actually covers on flood, erosion, and armoring (standard homeowners often covers none of it), learn your state’s shoreline rules before you need them, and budget the walls-insurance-permits-lawyers stack the way you already budget property tax. The “ask forgiveness” move has bought Quidnessett 999 days of litigation and a real chance it’ll be ordered to tear the whole thing out at its own expense.
The sea is patient and the state is well-documented, and the cheap time to deal with either is before the crane shows up at midnight. You don’t need a kayaker to spot your own exposure — pull the policy, note where the coverage stops, and check whether the plan already carries those defense costs or just hopes for calm weather. That’s a 15-minute look with a statement in hand, and a lot easier than explaining the wall after the storm.
Nothing direct for the models — this one’s for the readers who own waterfront. If that’s you, the insurance and permitting angle deserves a read before the next storm season: know what your policy actually covers on erosion and armoring, know your state’s shoreline rules before you need them, and put the defense costs in the long-term plan as their own line. The sea takes decades; the paperwork takes longer.