The demand for wideband communication in the coastal area (i.e., ≤ 100 km from the coastline) has been rapidly increasing in recent years. Compared to the terrestrial scenario, the coastal environment has long-distance and highly dynamic channels, and the communication devices are more strictly constrained by energy supplies. While the RLNC has the fountain erasure-correction property and is suitable for transmissions over the long-distance dynamic channels, it suffers from high coding coefficient delivery cost and decoding complexity. In this article, we look into the application of sparse network coding in coastal communication systems. We identify two typical multicast scenarios that may appear in coastal communications, namely the relay-aided multicast and multicast from a shore-based base station with D2D communication enabled among the subscribers. We provide a detailed comparison of existing sparse network coding schemes. Based on that, we demonstrate through simulations that an appropriate choice of sparse codes is critical to meet the unique requirements in coastal communication systems. We show that batched sparse code is suitable for relay-aided multicast, and subset-based sparse codes are preferable for D2D-enabled multicast.