max ebb: coast is clear

The last thing my race crew wants to do when we get back to the dock is hangaround and help puttheboat away.

So. in the interest of being the first crewbackattheyacht club bar, we usu¬ ally do a quick racing roll ofthejibs and just stuffthe spinnakers in their bags.

“Never do dishes 'til just before you need to use them," says one of my col¬ lege-age crew to justify this policy. He also claims that this is an “accountabil¬ ity issue” — that the spinnakers should always be packed by the person who is doing foredeck that day. right before the race. But really he just wants to get to the bar sooner.

There is only one problem with put¬ ting the boat away so fast: As theowner, it’s up to me to "do the dishes." I usually swing by the boat on Sunday morning after a Saturday race to tidy things up. fix what broke, schlep the racing sails off and put the cruising sails back on.

Butlastweekend I nevermade it that far. I was driving past the small beach near the entrance to the Marina — not even enough ofa beach to be noticed by most oftheberthers and restaurant cus¬ tomerswho drivebyit —when I encoun¬ tered a roadblock.

“P

X arking is this way!" said an at¬ tractive young woman as she pointed to a grassy area on the "Side of the road. She was behind a table set up right in the roadway, wearing a shirt that said 'volunteer' in big letters.

“I’m a berther in the Marina,” I tried to explain. “Can I just...”

“Here are the instructions,” said an¬ otheryoungvolunteer, thrustingasheet ofpaper into my open window.

“But I’m...”

“The briefing is about to start!” shouted a third volunteer from behind anothertable. “Ifyou hurryyou canjust make it!"

“What the heck,” I thought. “Whatever this is,.it seems to be attracting a lot of attention and I really don’t have to be at the boat at any particular time.”

So I pulled into one of the last open spaces in the designated parking area, locked the car and took a look at the papers in my hand.

I was alittle disappointed to discover, after sorting through the various direc¬ tions, schedules and maps, thatthis was “Coastal Cleanup Day." Not something I usuallybrake for. I was expecting maybe a stuntkite demonstration orsome other unusual performance art or festival event. But no, this was just a beach cleanup. And thereweren’t even any food kiosks put out by the local restaurants, like at the waterfront festivals. 1 decided to pass —butjust a few sec¬ onds too late. Another car had been di¬ rected into the parking space right be¬ hind me, and before 1 had the presence of mind to ask him to let me out. the driver had blocked me in and disap¬ peared over the hill in the direction of the briefing area. I was stuck. V

“Well, maybe this won't be so bad." I thought to myself. “With all these col¬ lege kids volunteering, I can probably pick up a few more names for my crew list.”

“TXfyou find, like, asyringe ora con¬ dom," instructed an amplified female voice to an audience that ranged in age from 3 to 90, "mark the spot with one of these yellow tags and our staffwill take care of it. For other yucky stuff like old T.P.. be sure to use your gloves."

It was Lee Helm, ofall people, stand¬ ing on a table giving the final briefing.

“Do you have extra gloves?” asked one of the participants. “I forgot to bring mine." v “For sure. We have a whole pile of ex¬ tra gloves right over there — and we guarantee that, like, none of them match." 1 moved in through the surprisingly large crowd, all ofthem holdingbig plas¬ tic bags, to get close to the table.

“Remember to fill out your log forms as you collect, and the most unusual item wins. You have exactly two hours, starting in 15 seconds."

She counted down, announced the start, and the crowd stampeded towards the beach.

“How did you ever get mixed up with this operation?" 1 asked Lee as I finally reached her table after pushingthrough a tide of volunteers running the other way with garbage bags. "It's fun,” she answered as 1 was is¬ sued my own big plastic bag. "And like, you won t believe some of the things people find on this beach." "1 never even realized there was a beach here.” 1 confessed, “Is it really that important to clean it up so thoroughly?”

“For sure,” she said. “This beach catches a lot of trash that drifts along the shoreline. It’s like, the plastics espe¬ cially that we need to recover. They do a lot of environmental damage."

“I know they look bad. but do they really hurt anything?"

“Max, where have you been?"

And she proceeded to give me a longv lecture about small plastic particles that cover the entire Pacific ocean, especially

Wm Above left, asamplingofCoastalCleanup finds. Above, 'Shipwreck Barbie' arrived on her own raft. Right, shoreline cleanup day. This yearit's September21.

the “Pacific Gyre,” a sort of Pacific ver¬ sion* of the Sargasso Sea, as Lee ex¬ plained, “where plastic fragments have been measured at three hundred thou¬ sand pieces per square kilometer — and sometimes theyevenoutweigh theplank¬ ton.”

B,ut there are a million square meters in a square kilometer,” I pointed out, “that’s still only about one tiny par¬ ticle for every three square meters.”

“Bad enough for me,” she said. “Plas¬ tics on the beach don’t biodegrade like other waste materials. They decompose into smaller and smaller particles, and these eventuallywashback into the Bay and out with the tide. About half ofthis meters in diameter, and it turns out they’re like, reallygood atabsorbing cer¬ tain toxic substances and then getting eaten by various forms of marine life.”

“I neverwould have thought a signifi¬ cant amount ofthat is spilled,” I said.

“Probably a lot ofevery industrial raw material gets spilled,” Lee conjectured, “but plastic is one of the materials that hangs around. Let’s go see what we can find on the beach.”

We e found a spoton the beach that wasn't already being picked clean by otherworkers, and Lee started to recover assorted junk for my bag, including bottle caps, six-packholders, bits offood wrappers, soda cans andyogurt contain¬ ers.

“Look!” I exclaimed as I spotted a white plastic object about six inches in diameter.

“You’re right!” Lee said with equal ex¬ citement. She got to it first. Itwas a com¬ pass cover, exactlythe right size and kind to fit my bulkhead compasses.

“It must have been practically new when it blew overboard — not even any fading or going brittle from the sun or the salt water,” she said.

“Well, that makes this stop worth¬ while,” I said with some satisfaction. “Now let’s look for some fenders, and maybe an extra lifejacket or two.”

Before we found any more booty we werejoined by a couple of Lee’s friends, morevolunteerswhowere helping to run

stuff floats, remember. So like, if I had to choose. I’d take oil rigs over plastic shoreline pollution any day. They both look ugly, butplastic is more likely to cause pertnanent damage to the ocean’s ecosystems than a carefully managed drilling operation — I mean, as long as there are __ no big accidents.”

“I’m ready to vote against oil produc¬ tion off the coast,” I said. “But how can we stop plastic pollution? Do ships still dump all their garbage at sea?"

“Most ofit comes from land, actually. From stormdrains and creeks. And like, a surprising amount ofplastic pollution is in the form of preproduction plastic pellets, which is plastic as a raw mate¬ rial that has never even been made into anything. They’re about one to five milli¬ the dVent and do their share ofcleaning. After introductions, I suggested thatthey might want to come out for a sail that afternoon — my usual first step when recruiting new race crew.

“I’ll even pick up a nice lunch at the local deli,” I said, sensing that theywere all in the starving student demographic. “My treat, in appreciation for all your vol¬ unteer work keeping the Bay clean.”

Suddenly their expressions changed. They eyed me with suspicion — as

though I had just proposed racing an SUV across a nature preserve.

“It does sound like fun," one of them said, “but to be honest, after cleaningup j all this trash left in the water by you peoplewithboats, IVe gotmixed feelings about it.”

“Now Waitjust a darn minute!” I pro¬ tested. “Sailors don’t throw things over¬ board. At least, notanymore. And cer¬ tainly not on purpose.”

“Butlookat thesebeercans,” he said. “Those don’t go down the drain from anyone’s house. And here’s an old fish¬ ing line. And what about that old leaky jerryjug over there with some outboard fuel still in it?” ^

Lee came to my defense. “That’s all powerboat and fish boat stuff,” she said. “Anyway, look at the stats: In 2001 there were hundreds oftons oftrash collected from California beaches. Only 5% was attributable to ‘ocean or inland water¬ way sources,’ but 54% was from land sources.' Ifyou look at the kinds oftrash in that category, it’s like, mostly fishingrelated.”

They argued thatthe 41% in the 'gen¬ eral' categorycould all be from boats, but

Lee convinced them that the blame for those materials should be allocated in the same proportions as those with known sources. “And it's like, a cultural thing, too,” she argued. “Sailors — at leastmostofthem—are prettywell clued in.”

Having settled that (although possi¬ blynotto the complete satisfaction ofmy prospective crew), we continued to col¬ lectjunkfrom thebeach. We found ahair brush, a Xerox toner cartridge, a sealed bottle ofvitamin B6, a redwoman's highheel shoe and a loose-leafnotebookwith somepages still legible — evidently some¬ one had thrown away a business plan for a biotech start-up.

Meanwhile, the sun had broken through the morning overcast, and the day was warming up quickly.

“A llnyone thirsty?" asked Lee as she pulled a couple of bottles of spring water out ofher backpack.

‘Thank you, I’ll have one of those, if you’ve got more,” I said.

“Sure, they’re giving them out free back at the table.”

We continued to debate the relative impacts ofvarious kinds oftrash. When Lee was finished with her water, she started to crush the bottle —nottheway you would crush a can, but more like rolling it up like a toothpaste tube from bottom to top.

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“I also tryto crush thosebottleswhen I’m cruising,” I said, “but they always seem to spring back as they sit in the trash, so itdoesn'treally save thatmuch space.”

“Don’t you put the cap back on?”

“Huh?”

“After you crush the bottle. Max. Put the cap back on so air can’t get back in, and it stays crushed. Observe. . .”

Lee rolled up her emptybottle as tight as she could, then screwed the cap back on top. Ofcourse thebottle didn’t spring back at all, but remained stable as a small crumpled lump of plastic.

“Why didn’t I ever think of that?” I said. “The onlytrick I knowis thatyou’re supposed to tear the beer cans in half before throwing them overboard, so they sink faster.”

Lee’s friends looked at me as if I had just taken a chainsaw to an old growth redwood.

“I mean, that's what we usedto do,” I added hastily. "Of course, nobody does it anymore.”

But theywere still giving me that 'evil polluter' look, so I made the mistake of trying to defend the practice as harm¬ less.

“Old beer cans are completely out of sight,” I insisted. No one’s ever going to go scuba divingforpleasureinthemiddle of the Bay. And they don’t degrade into anythingparticularlyharmful. Notnearly as bad as plastic. In fact, we even imag¬ ined we were being environmentally re¬ sponsible when we went to the trouble to tear the cans.”

“Well sure,” one of them sneered. “Compared to throwing the can in with¬ out tearing it.”

“Samewith glass,” I continued. “I used to have a gadget to break the bottoms ot. glass bottles, so we could toss them over and they’d sinkfast. ‘Bottle Bottom Bust-

ers, I think they were called, and they used to sell them atthe chandler¬ ies. In deep murky water, how does this damage anything?”

This touched off a de¬ bate abopt the relative damage done by clutter¬ ing up the bottom of the Bay with thin scraps of aluminum and glassversus adding to the Supply ofplastic waste.

These kids may be passionate, but they’renotirrational. They finally agreed, after a long technical discussion, that a can on the bottom ofthe Bay doesn’t re¬ ally do allthatmuch damage— although it was still a very bad thing to do from a ’’social consciousness” perspective.

“Sya like, ourstrictprohibition against throwing stuff over the side,” said Lee, “is reallyakind of‘environmental token¬ ism,’ because the effect is too small to make any real difference.”

“But tokens are important!” insisted the prospective crew. “That’s how we change cultural attitudes, and build the political will to correct the really big sources ofpollution.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Justas long as we’re clearonwhywe’rebringingourbeercans home to the landfill instead of letting them rest peacefully in the mud at the bottom ofthe Bay.”

“Besides,” added Lee as she produced a small bottle of carrot juice from her pack, “hardly anyone I sail with drinks beer anymore anyway.” Wereturned to the judges’ table to turn in our log forms — most ofwhich we filled out after the fact, making some wild guesses about numbers and weights. Our best item: a baseball cap that said “War Cry Racing Team” on the front, with pictures of an offshore racing powerboat embroidered on the sides. But it didn’t even make the finals, being clearly outclassed by a “shipwreck Barbie” on a crude raft, and by a small ornate rosewood box that said “Rover” on top and had the name ofa veterinary clinic on the bottom.

I never did find a fender, but my new compass cover, with a streetvalue ofover eight dollars, was enough ofaprize. And I had two good leads for new race crew.

College students may not do their dishes — but they sure like to keep the Bay clean.

— max ebb

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