Third Annual Great Lake Erie Boat Float – By Daryl Davis One of the several annual bad weather events in Northeast Ohio is the Boat Float sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Boat float participants race their boats 300 feet out and back off Edgewater Park beach in competition for three decorated plastic bottle trophies. This was FOWL’s second year in the boat float. In 2010 we came in second and this year we decided that we could win. So Alan Tomko began acquiring prime materials and he and Ray Stewart devised a pontoon assembly they figured would hold at least 350 pounds. Two weeks before the race, on a beautiful warm sunny day I tapped model boat builder Scott Bucher and we headed out to Alan’s and joined Helen Kopp to finish assembling the perfect boat – which Scott fitted with two low beach chairs, and braced with lengths of pvc and wood from a fence. We had a lot of fun and Alan and Patricia Cook made a fine dinner from the garden. If you ask me that was the best part of the whole event. Two weeks later the temperature dropped 25 or 30 degrees and it rained hard and long. Somehow this always happens at those “must do” events, like Earth Day on April 20th. We got to Edgewater Park at 8:00 am wading through water so deep I was soaked to the knees. A moment or so before 10:00 the thunder and lightening quit, the rain slowed down to mist, and the race began. Our brave paddlers, Helen Kopp and Scott Bucher made an amazing showing but two young guys with a much less engineered craft pushed ahead to first place at the last 50 feet. So FOWL II came in 2nd again.
So why do we do it? This race and design competition is held to call attention to the shocking amount of plastic junk that should be recycled but is usually used once and thrown overboard. A 2008 study of 671 fish concluded that 35 percent of them were contaminated with plastic. Marine scientist Marcus Eriksen who inspired the Boat Float says, "Plastic absorbs pollutants and releases chemicals in the fish that we eat." Big fish eat little fish and they both absorb the chemicals and accidentally ingest the bits of plastic.
This is not good for us but it is really bad for the wildlife. Anyone who has spent time on the Lake Erie shore has seen the extent of the problem. The shoreline at Wendy Park on Whiskey Island is probably the worst I’ve ever seen ankle deep in refuse and most of it is plastic. Mixed in with the plastic are dead and dying fish and birds. One gull was immobilized in a morass of plastic crap and was probably full of it. I would have made a move to free it but this bird was almost dead, and it did not even
Figure 1 Please avoid single-use containers whenever possible.
react to my curious dog who was only about 3 feet away from it on the end of her leash. We have to do something – maybe we have to do everything.