Ecologically concious trailer sailors [WAS: Ballast]

JBlumhorst@aol.com
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 11:01:56 EDT


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West Wight Potter Website at URL
http://www.lesbois.com/wwpotter/
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Hi webgang,

Water is a reasonable material for ballast, with many advantages. There's
one drawback to using water -- the issue of introducing new species to bodies
of water and upsetting the previous ecological balance.

If you fill your water ballast containers with water from one body, and empty
them later in another body, you might unwittingly have carried small critters
and other bio-contaminants. Even if you discharge your water in the lake/bay
from which you originally filled them, the residual water remaining in the
container may harbor hitch-hikers. The only safe way to do it, I suppose,
is to use treated tap water for ballast.

This is an issue with large container ships that use water ballast (zebra
mussels in the Great Lakes, and Oriental-something crabs in the San Francisco
Bay) as well as the newer water ballasted trailer boats like the MacGregor
26x's. In years to come, we're going to hear more horror stories about
destroyed ecosystems,and the culprit is going to be water ballasted boats.

At Clear Lake in the Sierra mountains of California, they're trying to fight
an invasion of hydra-something-or-other, a microscopic organism that is
carried on trailer boats and that has already invaded the ecosystem of the
lake. Signs remind boat owners to dump their ballast, wash their tanks, and
even wash boat exteriors and trailors on dry land away from the water's edge
before launching and after retreival.

I know there are a few eco-professionals on the Potter list. Perhaps you can
tell us more about how we can help control this threat to our beautiful lakes
and bays.

Best,
Judy B

In a message dated 6/16/99 12:39:51 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
hapilife@efn.org writes:

> I called around today looking for various types of ballast material. lead
> costs a lot. iron will rust. WATER IS CHEAP! i scavenged 6 empty gallon
> milk jugs and filled them with lake water at dockside and threw them up in
> the bow and lashed them to the anchor ring in the anchor compartment in my
> 15 with some nylon string to keep them in the bow and IT WORKED GREAT!!!!
> at 8.8 lbs per gallon i added 50 pounds of ballast up front down low.FREE.
> when we decided to nap for a while we just moved them to the cockpit no
> big deal. afterwards we left them in the boat but you could just empty the
> water out. Sure, keep the boat light for trailering, use water it doesn't
> scratch up the boat like bricks would. the only downside would be if you
> punctured the jugs somehow then the bilge would get some water in it.