Ahhhh, success...

So we are just wrapping up programming here at Sail Newport, and I can honestly say it was a great week. Not only did we get to interact with and educate a lot of kids, but we also pulled up an insane amount of trash out of the waters here surrounding Newport. It was incredible to see not only the amount of trash in the water but the forgotten and left behind derelict fishing gear. The Rozalia Project was able to pull 8 massive lobster traps out of the water. Even more shocking was the amount of trash built up in the actual fishing gear and traps; no could have predicted what we found in these traps, everything from beer cans and rubber gloves, to golf balls and PVC pipes. Essentially, there was an overwhelming amount of "trash within the trash." It was probably one of the most gratifying moments I have had thus far with the Project. Even the reactions on the kids' and instructors' faces around us indicated to me that we had shown them something that they would not soon forget. It was a great feeling to be apart of the team to pull those massive under water trash collectors out of the water.

Fortunately, this feeling of success has been one that has seemed to follow us throughout Rhode Island; in the past week we have been through Newport, Jamestown, Providence, and Bristol. While it has been extremely busy, it has also brought us some great kids and lots of opportunities to help communities clean their waters. Amazingly enough, these places while close in distance to each other, I found to be very different from each other. Providence seemed to possess its own kind of energy, and the Community Boating Center it is a wonderful place with an incredibly dedicated staff. Bristol and Jamestown were both quiet places for me, but we made some great finds. At the Herreshoff Museum in Bristol, we were able to take on the slightly different role of treasure hunter. There, employing the ROV and a little bit of diving, we were able to recover a beautiful antique bronze anchor, which we gladly handed over to the museum (it has a permanent home there, go check it out!).

Sloane

The Art of Going Slowly

We are just on the verge of our first Trash Bash Celebration for a Clean Ocean here at Providence Community Boating and taking some time to catch up on emails, phone calls, cleaning up the boat (and a little stand up paddleboarding on our new Bic SUP's).

It has been a great and satisfyingly crazy few days. My last post came from the daylight hours of what turned out to be a lovely and smooth, if not slow, overnight trip the length of Long Island Sound to Newport, RI. In some cases slow is good. Slow let us see 20+ firework shows at the same time along the length of the CT and Long Island shores. Slow let us enjoy only the sound of the water rather than the engine. Slow let us sail through The Race (the potentially extremely rough junction of Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean) very near slack tide. And slow let us arrive in Newport in the daylight to come alongside at the Museum of Yachting in Fort Adams. Despite the lack of sleep, we were happy to have a full day or recovery and some boat projects as well as time to watch the last start of the Transatlantic Race (go All-American Offshore team!!!).

After that, slow would not be the appropriate word for what has been going on... more like full-on. We had a great day with the kids at Conanicut yacht Club, around 92 of them! Thanks to a swiftly moving current it was not so much about picking up trash though we did recover a piece of dock fender, as it was about the ROV and the issues and problems of marine debris. CYC's director, Meg Myles, has been doing an excellent job integrating marine education with their sailing education and the kids were informed and excited to recognize creatures they had already learned about... as well as have an explore through the eel grass (which looked like swimming through a jungle). In many ways, I would rather fly the ROV around an environment full of fish, crab, sea urchins, starfish, colorful seaweed and little darting winter flounder than loads of trash. Unfortunately, we are not fooled by the clean bay as July 4th, Sloane, Laura and I picked up 2 huge bags of trash from the shores of Fort Adams in less than an hour.

Thanks to James' 5 am wake up and helming skills, we arrived in Providence in time to roll straight into trash pick up excitement with the Community Boating's STEM program (Science, technology, engineering and math) for the morning and then the sailing programs for the afternoon. This was the first stop where we had American Promise alongside a dock and it was very cool. We organized into stations: Laura gave boat tours teaching the sailors about the boat, its history, navigation and life at sea; Sloane led the net brigade recovering lots and lots of trash that was floating by on the fast moving tide and then sorting, measuring and recording the trash and I was in charge of the ROV/sonar/Smart Tether station.

Providence Community Boating was one of our pilot program stops and John and Will and their team of instructors do an incredible job giving the sport of sailing and access to the water to a diverse (and excited) group of kids and adults.

This stop saw us gain a piece of very exciting equipment, The KCF Smart Tether will let us know exactly where we are, where we are going and where we have been with the ROV, a luxury we have not yet had. We are especially excited to have this new piece of equipment going into the Newport stop where we know that derelict fishing gear is a problem. We will be marking the derelict traps we find so that Clean the Bay can come in behind us with their landing craft and pull it out!

So, the stats so far are approximately:
In 4 days of programs...300+ people have participated, we have picked up 500+ pieces of trash and have traveled a total of around 300 miles. We are on the verge of our first Trash Bash supported by the Boat US Foundation (yipppeeee, thanks to ALL of you who voted last month) and psyched to keep on rolling, meeting great people, having fun with the kids and picking up a whole lot of ocean trash.

If you or anyone you know are near any of our upcoming stops, we have lots of free and open to the public action:

Tonight (July 7): Trash bash, Providence Community Boating from 6-8pm
Friday July 8: Herreshoff Museum, Bristol, RI: boat tours in the afternoon
Saturday July 9: 10-3 trash hunting with the ROV off the docks
Sunday Jul 10: Time TBA boat tours
Wednesday July 13: 5-7pm Trash Bash at Sail Newport

Hope to cross paths (or wakes) with you soon,

rzm and the American Promise crew (right now: James, Sloane, Laura, Hickory and Smudge)

Spotters and Netters

We are now sailing east away from our first stop of Trash Tour 2011 in Oyster Bay and toward Narraganset Bay where we will visit 4 locations for marine debris programs and trash pick up. I just relocated from the very hot cabin/nav station to the deck and am loving the invention of laptops with decent batteries (it is a hot, sunny day with around 5 knots of breeze). **After writing this, we lost connectivity, so I am now posting after a lovely afternoon of up to 9 knots of speed and much cooler temps. Wind died again as we are approaching dusk and we are going to sail through the night to Newport to get ahead of

some storms forecast for tomorrow afternoon (and sail through the race with a favorable tide).

Thanks to the efforts of the Waterfront Center, Oyster Bay Marine Center and Oak Cliff Sailing Center, it was a great first stop. We had around 136 people participate in the dockside programs and we ran our very first on board program with WFC’s high school sailors.

Thursday morning, we welcomed 4 high school sailors and their 2 instructors/naturalists on board American Promise. After a history of the boat (and tour) as well as an intro to the types and problems of marine debris we designated some sailors as spotters and others as

netters. Before I give you the results, I have to say that we had not seen really any trash during the 2 days of boat work that we had before starting the program. There is a lot of current flushing in and out of the Bay, much of the shore is privately owned (rather than open for picnicking) and the oyster dragging process must get a lot of the trash off the bottom. That said, the kids did a great job spotting and picking up a box full of trash (we are about to weigh and measure it during today’s passage) all in a mere 30 minutes. On the way back, we balanced the low tech (but effective) nets with the high tech and revved up the Tritech Starfish side scan sonar which confirmed our expectations of a flat, uniform bottom (good for the oysters).

We triumphantly motored in to the area where the WFC runs their programs (nets held high) and picked up a mooring next to their oyster dragger turned education/tour boat, Christeen. That afternoon and all day Friday was spent with lots of WFC sailors, their instructors,

and the interested general public. We were using the VideoRay ROV and nets off the dock. We were happy to find that there was not a lot of trash on the bottom near WFC’s docks but there were some critters and some beautiful marine flora. Similar to what we found on the surface, you just need to look hard enough and even what seems like a very clean area of the water will give up its marine debris and we pulled out some plastic, a particularly elusive Bud Light can and a metal water bottle.

The WFC has a very diverse, well run and busy program incorporating marine education into their sailing and paddling programs and we found their young sailors aware of their surroundings and psyched to learn more. There was genuine excitement with each piece of trash we found and recovered and we even had some sailors and locals learn to fly the ROV and help with tether handling.

Sloane did a great job with her first marine debris program and we are now lucky enough to have Vermont sailor, Laura Dunphy, with us for the next week. Laura worked with me over the winter and won a Young Explorers Club grant to join us and study tunicates in Narragansett Bay (as I write this, Laura, Sloane and Hickory are napping on deck in preparation for an overnight sail into Newport).

Before heading for my turn on the helm, I want to say another big thank you to Alicia, Dave and all the instructors and naturalists at the Waterfront Center in Oyster Bay for being our

first hosts, to Oak Cliff Sailing Center for helping to make this happen and for spreading the word (and for some advice on our engine and for taking Sloane out on a classic boat for a Thursday night race) and to the Oyster Bay Marine Center and their launch drivers for the genero

us donation of a mooring and patience as Hickory and Smudge learned to get on and off AP and left handfuls of dog hair in their lovely launches. We appreciate all of the help and genero

sity and are psyched to head into Narragansett Bay for some more boat work, fireworks and best of all, trash pick up and education programs.

Think breeze (so we can keep rolling east under sail rather than motor),

rzm

(and the Rozalia Project/American Promise crew: James, Sloane, Laura, Hickory and Smudge)

Trash Tour started... and meet our newest crew member

After two weeks (hectic weeks to be honest, it is a boat project as well as a trash project), we set off on Sunday June 26 as planned. On board were a great and appropriate group of people: me and James, my mom and dad (who not only tolerated us but they dog sat, fed us, let us take over their house, laundry and time and all with the most generous enthusiasm... beyond even the call of a parent), Tom Peterson (our very first supporter and a sailor himself), my cousin Laurie Bell (who had spent many years on the Clearwater sailing up and down the Hudson), Hickory, Smudge and our newest crew member for the summer, Sloane Suciu. This is the brave soul who answered our call for a changemaker/intern and she has been awesome. We will use this post to introduce you to Sloane... or, I will let her introduce herself (because there is just too much todo, blogging was part of the lengthy job description and I have to learn to delegate anyway). Tomorrow we start the program at The Waterfront Center in Oyster Bay (we are writing this from mooring CB10).
We have time for the general public to join us Friday later afternoon into the evening right off the Oyster Bay Pier! We would love to see you or your friends who are around the north shore of Long Island!
And now, meet, Sloane...

rzm


Hey everyone out there, my name is Sloane, and I am the latest crew member to join the Rozalia Project on its mission to clean up our oceans. I am a student studying at the University of Detroit Mercy, but am lucky enough to be with the Rozalia Project for the next two months. While we have only been on the American Promise since Sunday, we have already experienced so much, from picking up trash on the Hudson River to sailing around New York City. New York City from the water was incredibly beautiful and an experience I am sure I will never be able to duplicate. Removing debris from the Hudson prior to sailing into the New York Battery also proved to be very enlightening; within a few minutes we were able to remove over 80 pieces of trash, and undeterminable amount of micro-plastic. It seems to me that even though we have a very busy summer ahead of us, we are also in a position to do a lot of good by removing debris and educating the public on the part they can play in keeping the ocean clean. As with everyone else involved in the Rozalia Project, I am very excited to be here and am looking forward to meeting my fellow ocean enthusiasts!!

Moving mostly forward

Before starting, I have to say the biggest THANK YOU this font allows to all of you who showed great enthusiasm and endurance voting for us in the Boat US Grassroots Grant funding contest. We ended up third which is as good as winning and we are waiting to hear from Boat US with the final contract (more on that when it happens - just wanted to say thank you).

I have been composing a new post in my head for a few weeks, especially throughout the last week as we have been in full-on high gear getting the boat ready for the official start of the Trash Tour. My feeling on boatwork is that the best one can expect is to move mostly forward in a day. And for the most part, we have been doing that - moving forward. Today - not so great, but the good news is that it is one of the first days since our big push that we have had a set-back that cost more than an hour or two. Today's issues notwithstanding, we have been rolling along. The interior is nice and newly white and now on the road to being organized. See photo right - those cabinets were literally a jumble of tools, fasteners, tape and parts from machinery that has not been on the boat since the original circumnavigation (anyone need Westerbeke generator parts?). I take no credit for this but give it all to our great friend Shirley Waterfield who was the driving force behind much of what you will see that is clean and organized on the boat. She could have her own organizer reality show.

Some of the issues that plagued us on the trip

up almost exactly one year ago are fixed - stuffing box being one of the biggest, James conquered that today, and the deck beam is done as well. Scarano Boat Building did an extremely and typically neat job (see photo right, and then go back to one of my first posts to see the rotten version). The rigging is re-run, deck repairs complete and the boom up. If all goes well, we will have the bottom painted tomorrow and boat launched on Wednesday. Then, after the next phase of (a lot of) jobs that require us being in the water, we will set off Sunday morning down the Hudson (a spectacular trip)!

In the nooks and crannies in between painting, scraping, cleaning, ordering and planning, I am working on a way for people to follow us (looking like the Spot Messenger) and I do

promise more frequent blog posts as well as Facebook updates with photos of trash and kids and trash and adults and trash and cool fish and pretty islands and our increasingly beautiful (and functional) American Promise... who is about to get some lovely new lettering and American flags.

More very soon. Keep your fingers crossed and best boatwork vibes coming our way.

Happy solstice,

rzm

If only the fish could vote...

If you are reading this, you likely already know that we were chosen as finalists in the Boat US Grassroots Grants funding contest. And we are holding strong in second which, in this case, is great as more than just the top vote-getter will receive funding to be announced on June 13.

This past week I was in Brownsville, TX representing VideoRay (the makers of the ROV we use) teaching professors from the University of Texas Brownsville and Texas Fish and Wildlife officers how to put their VideoRay and Tritech SeaSprite sonar to use as part of their joint artificial reef program.

Not only was it great working with a group of bright people motivated to learn everything they can about the creatures of the

sea and how to make them thrive, but I got to check out some of the results of their work. Our first ROV dive site was an artificial reef off South Padre Island. We approached along a tag line attached to the superstructure of the wreck that had been painstakingly cleaned (of chemicals and oil) and then put on the bottom ready to be populated. And populated it was. The ROV was surrounded by hundreds of multiple species of fish as soon as we descended to the wreck. It was beautiful and a great bonus that I was with people who could name every fish (and tell me some cool facts about them as well).

As far as marine debris goes, in this case we were looking for fish instead of trash. We found a lot more fish than trash which was nice though I did see some plastic shopping bags floating around and when we were working in the port, there was the usual assortment of bottles and wrappers as well as plastic sheeting. But mostly this trip was about fish...

So many fish. I wish they could vote. If they knew what we were doing (getting trash out of their environment), I bet they would be psyched to vote as well. But they can't and so I want to to say that we are grateful for all of you that have been taking a few seconds each day to vote and to spread the word. We appreciate every effort on our behalf, on behalf of the fishes and on behalf of a clean, trash-free ocean.

rzm

To vote for Rozalia Project's Trash Tour via the web click here

To vote for Rozalia Project's Trash Tour via Facebook, click here

This cup may have killed Nemo's Mom

A friend told me to say hello to Prince when I said I was going to Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis, MN. I had tucked that comment away while packing the VideoRay, Lynn and Blueview for a visit to the Wayzata Community Sailing Center and a daytime as well as an evening marine debris program.

I had never been out there. And the day I arrived was the first sunny and mild day they had since last Fall which made everyone I met very friendly and happy (they might have been both friendly and happy anyway, but especially so with the nice weather). The Wayzata Community Sailing Center and Wayzata Yacht Club are neighbors and were full of people sailing and working on their boats when I arrived. Under the leadership of Collegiate Hall of Fame coach, Cappy Capper, their High School sailing program has over 60 sailors. And that is who I was going to work with on the following day.

Wednesday dawned sunny and cool with a strong southerly. Nice to look at but not great for underwater work as it stirred up the bottom a bit (lucky for the Lyyn and the Blueview sonar). After putting the ROV back together from travel, Cappy and I set off in a whaler for the other side of the lake to see if we could find trash near the public launch ramp and to see if we could find some evidence of horrible zebra mussels. We have them all over Lake Champlain but Lake Minnetonka just started finding them last year (bummer). The ROV tried to give me a heart attack by functioning intermittently (very unusual) but we were able to fly it around some docks. The bottom had a fair amount of weed despite it being early in the season and very little trash (perhaps for the same reason). No zebra mussels but there were not a lot of surfaces nearby for the zebra mussels to attach themselves to (yet).

WYC has a very pretty and well appointed clubhouse so we set up for the high school

and college sailors there (I love it when I can plug into an LCD projector and it just works without having to conjure up various spells). We managed to fit around 60 people into the club for my Intro to Marine Debris and Rozalia Project presentation and then split into groups for dockside ROV/sonar work and a new activity: creating public service announcements (PSA's). They were challenged to perform one about marine debris in general and another about taking action (since that is what Rozalia Project is about - taking action).

As far as the ROV work went, we did not find any trash! Rocks, weed, rocks, dock pilings, rocks, a sheet pile wall (great on the sonar) and more rocks but not one piece of trash under or near the docks. While it made for less than exciting ROV work, I think that is a good thing...

and we started to let some of the sailors have a hand at flying the ROV themselves (carefully of course).

The afternoon concluded with the presentation of the PSA's. Some of the groups really put some thought and creativity into them and it was fun to see the results. You can see the two best PSA's posted on the Rozalia Project Facebook page by clicking here. The first will make the title of this post make some sense.

That evening, I had the pleasure to give the presentation again to club membership and their families. We had a small but engaged and lovely group who clearly care about the marine environment and love the sport of sailing (as well as swimming). I am grateful to Cappy Capper, the Mike Plant Fund, and the Daniel C. "Shino" Shinozaki Memorial Fund for giving me this opportunity.

Next up... boat work!!! American Promise has already had her foc'sle painted and today we are going through the list to adjust the work plan. Anyone up for some boat work?

rzm

Really big PS: back to the comment about Prince. I love Prince. I remember riding my bike to the mall to see Purple Rain a million years ago (I know this is dating myself, but at least I was too young to drive when it came out). On the way from the airport to WCSC, Cappy texted me, "I have something really fun for us tonight." I texted back, "yippeeee." His reply was, "it is

better than yipppeee." I was not sure what could be better than that... until he told me that his cousin, the talented and funny Mark Stewart, is the music director and in Paul Simon's band (plays multiple instruments incredibly - like everyone in the band) and were going to see them that night at a small club in Minneapolis! I almost dropped the ROV (but didn't). The show was AMAZING. Musical talent and creativity was literally dripping off the stage. I was even standing next to a great couple who actively participate in keeping the river clean in Minneapolis. And, getting back to Prince, the show was at First Avenue... where Purple Rain was filmed. So cool.