Heading Out On The Water - After You Leave The Grocery Store
Like most boaters who are heading out for the day or longer, now that you are stocked with groceries it is time to head to the boat. Once you reach the marina the scramble begins to get all your stuff onboard and get out on the water as soon as possible. Before you weigh yourself down with all your stuff, however, take a minute to make your life easier and the earth a little happier.
Instead of wandering down the dock with you arms full, take a moment in the grocery store parking lot to reduce the size of your load. If you were not quite ready to proclaim your greenness to the world by taking your own shopping bags into the store, whip them out now in the parking lot while no one is looking. Carefully remove every bit of excess packaging you can find on the stuff you just bought and tuck it away. This too takes a little practice, but before you know it you will find yourself walking the docks with a lighter burden than you are used to.
A family of four can count on filling one grocery sack with wrappers and packaging after stocking up at the store for a weekend on the boat. Those pop tarts you bought are wrapped and stuck in a cardboard box. Why not get rid of the box now? You will have to get rid of it later anyway, so why carry it down to the boat, deal with it and carry it back off the boat with your other trash. Take those apples out of their plastic sack, set free the eight packs of Hershey bars, liberate the mustard and mayo from all that plastic wrap.
The idea here is to look at each item you need to get to your boat and get rid of any unnecessary packaging now. Instead of filling your boat’s garbage can with a bunch of material that might find its’ way overboard, lose it now. You just paid the grocery store plenty for these things, now let them get rid of your garbage too. They won’t mind.
Not only will this practice make your ramble down the docks a little easier, it will also keep a bunch of potential pollution a long way from the water. I always see people doing this at the marina, unloading the groceries and tossing their garbage in the big green dumpster. But take a look at that dumpster late Sunday afternoon and chances are it is overflowing. A nice big breeze is all it takes to launch those cellophane wrappers that you could have left at Wal-Mart.
Stash your trash before you get to the water, it’s easy and you’ll feel better on a lot of levels. Do this a few times and you will also begin to appreciate how much crap you have been transporting unnecessarily all these years. You will also get to enjoy a moment of clarity as you pass your neighbor a few slips down who has thirteen plastic sacks of groceries sitting on the dock.
