May 1, 2009 by Rob Weltner
Growing up on the water in south Freeport, you can bet that as a kid who spent time fishing and crabbing, I would try to imagine what the bottom looked like. Were there millions of crabs marching over thousands of flounder? It was questions like this that would drive me to take up scuba diving: I just had to see what the heck was going on down below! After 30 years of diving I have seen some amazing things, but I have also seen some things that made me realize we have made some major mistakes.
Having friends that work in boat yards and owning your own scuba gear makes for a lot of diving to recover all kinds of items lost overboard. At work I installed bubble systems and changed zincs and props; while changing zincs under boats in February I saw something that changed my perception of boats and bottom paint for good.
While working on my fifth boat under the ice, my numb hands dropped one half of a shaft zinc down into the mud 15 feet below. I slowly descended head first, looking for the hole in the mud where my missing zinc would be; in the cold winter water the visibility was about the same 15 feet and all I could see was a blue bottom (which made it easy for me to locate the hole the missing zinc had created).
As I reached down deep into the mud, I felt something moving. Suddenly a flounder shot out from the mud! It swam a few feet forward and settled on the blue bottom. Years of digging around ocean wrecks and bay bottoms you never know what you’re going to spook up, but this fish looked like no other flounder I had seen before: it was severely disfigured and had sores on it. As I got closer it started to swim, so I followed as if it was taking me on a tour. I saw the bottom change from blue to red and then to green. What the heck had I just seen?
Why was the bay bottom all these colors? Is somebody dumping paint in the water? Lord help the person if my bay rat friends or me find him…as soon as I find that zinc and put it on I’m coming up and let the guys know what’s going on!Several days would go by before we would realize what was happening. The location I was diving in was located next to a neighboring marina’s boat bottom pressure washing area. It seems that when many marinas haul boats for winter storage, a pressure washer is used to remove any growth on the boat bottom. Along with a few barnacles, some of the paint was coming off and was ending up back in the bay. Boaters and marina workers don’t have to be marine biologists to read the back of can of bottom paint, which says plainly and simply: THIS MATERIAL IS TOXIC TO FISH. So now, along with other efforts to restore our waters, I hope we all understand that the consequences of not heeding the warning on a can of bottom paint is a no brainer. We must keep as much bottom paint out of the water as possible; we owe it to the fish and ourselves to do so.
