Why Greenboatblog and Greenboatstuff Exists.
When I first heard the term “green” associated with anything I had visions of my wonderful hippy Aunt Wendy, dancing through her garden in a homemade dress and thanking the pagan gods for her fresh vegetables.
For most of my adult life I have been a pretty clean cut, rational taxpayer who never thought a lot about the environment unless an oil spill was front-page news. Sure I enjoy a good summer day at the lake, but until recently I took Mother Nature for granted.
Like most boat owners, I want my boat to look nice. I want my engine to run smoothly. I want my family to enjoy our time on the water with good food, comfy clothes, plenty of fun things to do, and a clean cabin that doesn’t smell. When I started fooling around on boats I figured the easiest way to have all these things was to think of my boat as a house.
At home we had jugs of cleaners, bottles of bleach, boxes of laundry soap, rolls of plastic bags, and every other convenience available to supposedly make life better.
Most of these products found their way to our boat without any real thought on my part. If a cleaner said “biodegradable” on the label I might buy it as long as it wasn’t too expensive. I never thought to question what “biodegradable” really meant, I just assumed it meant a product was harmless if it got in the water.
In the spring I joined most folks in our marina by scrubbing and polishing and using all those nifty cleaners to try and outshine my neighbors.
Every fall I changed my diesel engine’s oil and usually got most of the gunk cleaned up. When it came time to fill the fuel tanks I tried to be careful but more than once some fuel spilled overboard. As the colorful slick spread around my boat I was much more worried about what my fellow boaters thought than I was about the pollution I had just let go. After all, the lake we are on is huge-those few drops of fuel wouldn’t cause much harm would they? After a day on the water we hauled our trash to the marina dumpster like everybody else, all three bags of it.
Then one day I read a book.
Quite by accident I grabbed a copy of Carl Safina’s “Song for the Blue Ocean.” The cover looked cool and since I like to read, I thought I should learn a little about the Ocean. As the plight of the majestic blue fin tuna, the incredible Pacific salmon, and numerous coral reef inhabitants unfolded I began to question my beliefs about the environment. Carl’s book led me to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and beyond.
As I began to question my beliefs about the true state of the environment two real life experiences opened my eyes even more,.
Being a devoted sailor I long dreamed of cruising in the British Virgin Islands. Several thousand miles and several thousand dollars later my family and I found ourselves chartering a sailboat in the BVI over the Thanksgiving holiday. Here we were having the time of our lives, overcoming my daughter’s fear of sharks and my fear of looking like I might not know what I was doing. The weather was perfect, the sailing terrific, all in all, paradise. Then one day, as we were lounging in the bay that supposedly inspired Robert Louis Stephenson to write “Treasure Island”, a plastic shopping bag floated by our stern.
I almost cried. In that moment I completely connected with the old Indian chief in the 1970’s commercial who cried after canoeing through garbage and having litter thrown at his feet.
A few months later the family was on Maui. On an afternoon getaway my wife and I took the windy road to Hana to see “Old” Hawaii. Driving just south of Hana the beaches are beautiful – from a distance. This is one of the first spots in all of Hawaii where the waves from the mainland come ashore.
Unfortunately the breakers carry with them all sorts of junk. Like the commercial just mentioned, a walk on these beaches also took me back to memories from my childhood – memories of climbing through garbage at the dump. Plastic water bottles, soap containers, what I mistook for sea-foam but was actually millions of tiny pieces of Styrofoam, nylon nets, poly ropes, junk, junk, junk, littered the beach.
It soon dawned on me that if these beaches were so littered, even though there were plenty of people who routinely try to clean them up, how awful it must be on those countless shorelines without a “Friends of the Beach” committee.
These experiences, a mountain of books, countless articles, website after website, and plenty of nights at my desk until 3 AM led me to start greenboatstuff.com and launch this blog. I am just an ordinary guy. I claim no particular brilliance and I have no fancy letters after my name. While I may lack “official” credentials, I do believe I possess enough common sense to make a case for why we should take better care of our rivers, lakes, and Ocean. It is my sincere hope that through this blog I can shine a light on the true state of the waterworld we boaters too often take for granted.
