GL: Lake Champlain Water Quality & "follow the rules"

[Ken Bloomfield]

Wesley wrote:
"I regret the inconvenience this regulation causes for some but a padlock or
tie-wrap under the control of the captain does not strike me as an effective
method of preventing an illegal discharge."

I believe that he has just laid his finger on the issue.  There is in fact no
such thing as an "effective method of preventing illegal discharge".  That
kind of thinking would require a tie wrap around the "thingy" of every little
boy who swam in the lake, and perhaps corks for the girls.  Perhaps limit the
number of ducks swimming at any given time as well.  Even with the pipes
removed, how do you catch the boater caught short who then widdled in his sink
and washed it down?  Maybe all sinks should be removed as well, or at least
the drain pipe from them removed as well?

I am not against environmental sensible rules, and in fact I believe that the
non-sensible ones do the environment a disservice.  As has been pointed out,
even if you took every registered boat with a head installed, and assumed that
they were all boating on the same day (a real stretch); -- the amount of
harmful discharge from a sensible approach such as Raritan provides would be
so infinitesimally small that it would be meaningless.  Dilution is the
solution in this case.

This whole issue is an emotional one, not a scientifically or logically
sensible one but unfortuately the rules have been set by the knee-jerk
emotives not by someone actually looking at the magnitude of the "problem" to
see if in fact there really is a problem.  The result of this bass-ackward
approach to regulation is that boats will not have a treatment device
installed, but when the holding tank gets full and there is no reasonable
access to a pumpout -- the result will be raw blackwater released one way or
the other.  This is just plain stupid.

Ken
AGCLA 3529
MTOA 2062
Tellico Lady, 50' Marine Trader
Maryville, TN