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Clean The Bay

by Mary Grady
July 2006

Two intrepid boat captains take shoreline cleanup into their own hands.

          
          

"It's a mess out here!" says Ed Hughes, shaking his head over the piles of debris littered along the edges of Narragansett Bay. "And it's not getting any better, it's getting worse!" chimes in Alan Wentworth, from the helm of his workboat. These two have spent the last 15-plus years working on the water -- Wentworth as a Sea Tow operator and Hughes as a charter fisherman. Now they both have been bitten by a bug that seems to be turning them into the Click and Clack of coastal cleanup.

It began when one of Hughes' clients remarked that the bay is so beautiful, why is it so trashed? Hughes couldn't think of an answer. Why should there be rotting abandoned boats, ancient broken piers, chunks of flotation foam, plastic bottles and beer cans strewn amid the sea grass and rocky beaches all along the shore?

"I don't know what it is, but I got a real bug about it," says Hughes. He and Wentworth got their cameras and set out to document the problem. Working close to shore in their small boats, they took hundreds of pictures, from East Greenwich to Tiverton, along Patience, Prudence and Hope Islands, into Warwick's shallow coves.

Besides tons of trash, they found almost 100 "camels," huge wooden fenders, each weighing over a ton. They're made of massive timbers held together with rusting iron straps. "These things are decades old, but they don't rot because they're soaked in creosote," says Wentworth. "They're toxic. And if a big storm comes along, they're going to be floating in the bay. They float low in the water so you can hardly see them, and you don't want to hit one."

The two put together a collection of their photos and sent them off to the state's congressional delegates, to Governor Carcieri, to environmental groups, anyone they hoped could pitch in to solve the problem. And when a friend of theirs decided to sell an old 56-foot landing craft he'd restored, they grabbed it. "It's perfect for this," says Wentworth. "You can put a Dumpster on the deck for all that small stuff. And you can pull right up to shore and winch those camels on board and get rid of 'em."

Now they have a workboat, a Web site, and a name -- Clean The Bay. They've teamed up with the state Department of Environmental Management to apply for a federal grant, and they organized an Earth Day cleanup along the Warwick shoreline in April. "We're committed," says Hughes. "We're gonna do this." Wenworth adds, "If nobody helps us, it will just take longer." This summer, they found a camel with clear Navy markings on it. They're hopeful that will help convince the Navy to contribute to their cleanup.

Camel on Prudence Island shore.
Heading home to Little Allen Harbor from our tour of the shoreline, we encounter a dishwasher-size chunk of white plastic foam afloat in mid-bay. Wentworth motors alongside and the two captains pitch in to drag it on board, where it takes up half the foredeck. As we pull in, Hughes offloads his catch of the day onto the dock for disposal. "That's one down," he says. "A couple bazillion more to go."

The captains welcome volunteers and donors at www.cleanthebay.org.


Pictures of Earth Day cleanup courtesy of Clean The Bay.
NOTE: A shorter version of this story ran in Rhode Island Monthly magazine in April 2006.


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