CBM
from the editor
Tidying Up Life-changing magic happens right here by Joe Evans
M
aggie Hughes had a great idea. What if we (the Maryland chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association) used the iAngler Tournament app to stage a state-wide stream and shoreline trash clean up? iAngler Tournament is a cool and efficient, cloud-based, photo-recording system that we use to score catch&release fishing competitions such as the famous Boatyard Bar & Grill Opening Day Rockfish and the popular Kent Narrows Fly & Light Tackle tournaments. Maggie is CCA’s assistant director. She’s also cool and efficient. The concept blossomed into a week-long “Let’s throw it away for the Bay” program and party, anywhere and everywhere around the watershed with sponsorship support from Costa’s Kick Plastic and Sweetwater Brewery’s Save our Water initiatives, and a social media push from Chesapeake Bay Magazine. My family unit joined the Annapolis CCA crew and Arundel Rivers Federation volunteers on a Saturday morning sweep through a bog and creek downhill from a giant housing development that relentlessly feeds trash into a South River tributary. After a couple of hours, we had scored about 12 50-gallon bags, a small dent in the problem. But we felt good about ourselves, and bad about the situation that we, as a civilization, have gotten into. During the hunt, I recalled an evening about 15 years ago when I had the pleasure of guiding a couple of
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ardent Chesapeake Bay conservationists on a fly-fishing trip. We were anchored up in Kent Narrows to fish the bridge pilings when a gust blew an empty beer can over the rail into the notorious Narrows current. I was building fresh leaders for my anglers, and the rockfish were biting, and it was just too much to unravel, pull the anchor, and chase down the disappearing can. I was
willing to tidy up after us. Going a bit further with that thought leads to considering the next generation who will be cleaning up whatever mess we leave. The greatest value to group trash collecting is not how much gets done, but how it effects your outlook. That you are not alone in this, and that it’s important and even some fun to share the experience. Seeing how persistent and awful the problem is—the boundless extent of Meet Jack, a Chesapeake angler in development. plastic bottles, wrappers, Styrofoam, toys, ice-cream spoons, Big-Gulp cups, miniliquor bottles, party balloons, and so many straws—changes your approach to snacks, takeout meals, shopping bags, and single-use anything. While we can feel a bit smug and superior about sending a dozen bags of other peoples’ junk to the landfill, we will return home to confront our own plastic reality. Afterwards, Maggie and CCA hosted an excellent Chesapeake Clean-up Week barbecue at the Annapolis Maritime Museum’s Ellen Moyer Nature Park campus with Sweetwater 420 Pale Ale, S’mores, a tub of hot dogs, and custom-built, smoky, doublesheepish about it until one of them said, cheese burgers by CBM’s in-house chef “Hey don’t worry. Let’s just be sure to Patrick Loughrey. pick up two pieces of trash when we This is when the toddlers and can to make up for that one.” babies came out. Like Jack Sikorski, And that’s the point. We are all shown here, a bay saver in the making. upstream, and we are all downstream. We are tidying up for him. When we pick up someone else’s trash, we are essentially trying make up for our own plastic outflow. We can only joe@chesapeakebaymagazine.com hope that someone downstream is
September 2019