July 1, 2009 by Rob Weltner
As sailors, most of us have or should have a little more than your normal landlubber’s observation for weather. My grandfather, Captain James Musser, always reminded me in his deep voice to “keep a weather eye out” when we were going fishing.
Weather should always dictate our boating plans.
Heavy fog is a trip killer unless you are able to tell the difference between a buoy, another boat or a bridge on your radar screen. Rain is likely to shut down the family boating trip; it’s no fun eating soggy cheese and crackers while the kids go through every nook and cranny on your boat looking for the piece of bait they dropped inside the cabin.
When you add wind to a mix of fog and rain, we’ve got ourselves a real storm!
Wind changes everything on the water. The sooner each boater realizes this major factor the longer his or her (boating) life will be. In the mid 1970s, fishing out at the Hudson Canyon, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the wind was blowing over 60 knots. Coping with 25 foot seas in a 33 foot boat was the day we learned our “wind rules” lesson but that’s a story for another time, as this column concerns dealing with cleaning our waterways after the storm passes.
With all that wind and rain washing and blowing all kinds of garbage down the storm drains and into the bay, it’s no wonder that after every weather eruption the oceans and bays are full of debris.
Some trash is hazardous to boaters, like the large piece of wood I have with one propeller blade imbedded in it, and much poses a peril to marineLife. As SPLASH boat captains on a mission to keep our coastal waterways debris free, we each have our favorite spots to go after storms to “catch a lot of trash” (the locations are almost as guarded as favorite fishing spots).
Captains and crews routinely take pride in their trash collection skills, and it’s great listening to accounts like “we got four barrels there last week”, but we all knew that after a storm they could lay claim to more. I would hear our volunteers say: “We went back to the same spot this week cause we knew with all that rain and an east wind blowing it would be bad again”, and reading the SPLASH “Boats Ships Log” they are right more often than not. “Got another four barrels again this week, lots of wood and styrofoam” read one entry; “we had the beach spotless last week but it’s trashed again” reads another.
After every storm we have to reclaim the beauty of the bay. As I pull up to the SPLASH boat dock and look over at the dumpsters overflowing with trash, I always paraphrase Quint’s great line from the movie Jaws: “The garbage man’s gonna have a heart attack when he sees what we brung’em!”
