On a rainy December night, Tom Wood arrives at the C & C Sailing Club's annual holiday party in Annapolis, bearing scrub brushes and jugs of toilet cleaner and antifreeze.
It's one of many evenings and weekends that Wood, co-founder of a computer company and a lecturer on negotiating, devotes each year to talks on boating and bay pollution.
As a volunteer speaker for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, he's a model of what citizens can do on their own to improve the environment. Over the years, he's built on his personal interests in boating and fishing to become as expert as CBF's paid staff in certain areas.
Wood's talk this night included an update on disposal of sewage from pleasure boats, a subject on which I'd found little reason for optimism when I did a book evaluating the health of the bay a few years ago.
"Perhaps the single most embarrassing failure of all our Chesapeake cleanup commitments," an Environmental Protection Agency official called it then.
That was 1990; and it was good to hear from Wood that some progress has begun since -- more so in Maryland than Virginia, but even there things are looking up.
Overboarding the contents of boat heads often is seen as a minor pollution source, compared to the huge discharges from municipal sewage plants and the runoff from tens of millions of acres of farms, city streets and suburban lawns. In the bay-wide scheme of things, that is true, but the practice still begs important issues.
In localized situations -- marinas, small creeks and other popular "gunkholes" where boats congregate -- dumping waste can turn the water quite nasty, causing severe sags in oxygen needed by aquatic life.
Wood told his audience that rising bacteria counts between a Thursday and a Sunday can make the waters of a pristine-seeming anchorage dangerous for swimming. And some chemicals used to disinfect and deodorize the contents of the head may be as harmful to aquatic life as the sewage itself.
Bacterial contamination no longer is the only impact of boat waste we worry about, he said.
Nutrients, principally nitrogen and phosphorus, are a major factor in the bay's widespread loss of oxygen and underwater grasses; and disinfection doesn't do anything to reduce them.
Just as important is the personal responsibility factor. Big impact or small, what gives anyone the right to pump their waste directly into the bay? Especially given the trends.
Fifteen million people now live in the estuary's drainage basin, double the population of 50 years ago, and headed toward 18 million by 2020.
Some 400,000 boats use Chesapeake waters, nearly three times as many as during the mid-1960s, and the number still is growing more rapidly than population.
Boat wastes are part of a larger mosaic of ways individuals affect the environment, from the fish they keep, to how they fertilize their lawns, to how well they keep their car tuned.
It is becoming increasingly clear that without all citizens taking more personal responsibility, the "big" cleanup programs aimed at sewage plants, industries and agriculture won't be enough.
Wood gets all that across in an easygoing, un-preachy fashion. He's a boater, and he knows that being responsible often has been easier said than done.
For example, the best solution for boats large enough for people to overnight on is to have a built-in waste holding tank, which is emptied back at the marina, where sewage can be taken to a treatment plant. However, until recently, bay pump-out facilities were far and few between.
Clean Vessel boost
But Maryland has aggressively competed for a $40 million pot of money recently available, nationwide, under the federal Clean Vessel Act of 1992. So far the state has received $2.2 million, and expects to get half a million annually until the law expires in 1997. (It may get renewed then.)
The money will enable all 45 of the state's marinas with 200 boats or more to have pump-out facilities by next July; and by 1997, all of about 200 marinas with 50 boats or more will have them (as well as some of the 200 or so marinas with fewer than 50 boats).
Virginia, which has garnered about $390,000 in Clean Vessel Act money for its 750 marinas, is still working on a plan of action to upgrade its pump-out facilities.
From his audience, Wood hears about real-world problems with waste disposal: The lineups at the pump-out are lengthy on Sundays; holding tanks stink up boats; a long cruise simply overwhelms the tank's capacity; marinas aren't open in the winter.
Wood says he knows of at least one marina where, for $11, you can call a firm to come pump you out during the week, after you've gone home. As for smells, spend a few bucks more on the best quality hoses you can connect to the holding tank; they make all the difference in the world in controlling odor, he says.
On a long cruise? Well, this is Wood speaking, not the bay foundation, when he says: "It's better environmentally to dump your tank in deep water, over 20 feet, than in the shallows. I'm telling you to break the law, but I know how it is."
There is plenty more to "clean" boating, Wood goes on, "and the best news is, it's mostly cheap and good for your boat."
Two-part teak cleaners (acid, followed by neutralizers) are "poison . . . and break down your teak over time." He advocates an inexpensive, biodegradable product "and a little more elbow grease."
Buy a $6 oil-absorbent device to leave in your bilge all year. It keeps oil from going overboard when you clean and pump your bilge. (A biodegradable bilge cleaner also is readily available.)
For general boat cleaning, he uses "just a high-quality scrub brush." If the boat is really dirty, "get a biodegradable cleaner, or a non-chlorine, soft abrasive."
One sailor has a helpful hint: Use Easy Off oven cleaner to avoid the toxic dust associated from sanding off old bottom paint.
Wood winces. "Easy Off is pretty nasty stuff to be washing in the water." Clean air considerations are pushing more marinas to use vacuum sanders for dust-free paint removal, he says.
Nontoxic alternatives
For winterizing boat water and waste systems, he holds up a jug of nontoxic antifreeze; another nontoxic brand is now available for coolant in inboard engines, he says.
As for outboards, they are mostly two-cycle design, so inherently polluting that he has taken to trailering his 20-foot outboard fishing boat to launch ramps near where he is going. It creates less air pollution than running the boat long distances, and saves wear and tear on the outboard, he says.
The sailors are attentive; a couple even take notes. But one sailor theorizes that pollution from the freighters anchored off Annapolis is a bigger problem than any club member.
After the talk, Rick Kinder of Lancaster, Pa., tells Wood he and his wife went through such discussions years ago on the Great Lakes, where a tough "no discharge" policy has long been in effect.
"It's not the freighters," Kinder says. "It's not the 'other guy' -- it's all of us."