Spring’s Dirty Little Secrets

Published: Thursday, April 16, 2020
By: Ken Quant

Sailors have dirty little secrets when it comes to spring commissioning and it has nothing to do with go-fast techniques or advanced rig tuning. Instead, it has to do with the excessive environmental impacts of our spring commissioning projects. Yes, I’m as guilty as every other paint stained boat owner of ignoring my toxic sins and I have chosen to ignore these dirty habits due to time constraints. It’s just easier than trying to do what I know is right for the environment. Since I never feel very good about these indiscretions, this spring I’m going to try to clean my conscience and the boat at the same time with a few simple changes to my usual routine.

The first thing I plan to do is probably the simplest one of all. I will be sure to recycle the shrink wrap cover. This seems like a no-brainer, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened the boat yard dumpster to see huge piles of plastic stuffed inside awaiting a one-way trip to the landfill. I can’t imagine a more egregious example of a single-use plastic, so this year I plan to make sure the winter cover finds its way to recycling. If our yard is not making specific accommodations to recycle these covers, I plan to just toss it in my car and put it out with my household recycling.

The next dirty little secret I’m planning to overcome is to try and contain the toxic sanding dust that comes off the bottom when I’m prepping the hull for paint. All bottom paint is toxic by design, but because I race a lot, the copper-based ablative paint I use is especially nasty. When I sand, the dust usually just ends up on the ground around the boat where it will eventually be washed directly into the nearby water with the next rain. This can’t be good, but this year I’m planning to hook my sander up to a vacuum to try and contain as much dust as possible so it can be disposed of properly. This may be a bit of a hassle, but I’ve been collecting linkable vacuum hoses to create a long connection between the sander and the sucker in hopes that this won’t be too much of a wrestling match.

The last dirty little secret I’m going to try tackling is to not pump the RV antifreeze that is winterizing our motor directly into the water when I first start her up this spring. Our little motor alone uses about a gallon of that stuff to completely fill the raw sea water cooling system in the fall. That’s a lot of relatively toxic antifreeze to dump directly into the lake. If you think about it, you would never just go and pour out a gallon of that stuff into the water on its own, yet, because it’s in the cooling system, I have previously allowed myself to simply ignore the fact that I’m literally doing that every spring. We all know it’s happening, but most of us are guilty of just closing our eyes and letting it flow into the water because we’re too lazy to do something about it. Not this year though. I’m planning to exchange the antifreeze with raw water before the boat gets launched. To do that, I will set up a bucket to catch the old antifreeze and then replace it with plain water using the same process I do for winterizing. That way I can take the old antifreeze to my local hazardous waste drop-off place and dispose of it properly.

I’m sure these actions will be more of a hassle this spring, but for the sake of the lakes, I’m going to give them a try. My hope is that my efforts will help spread awareness to other boaters so they may follow suit. If more of us try to do the right things by mitigating our own dirty little secrets, we may just end with a slightly cleaner world in the long run.