Pollution 3

There is a lot of disinformation on wastes. The present legislation requiring ports (including marinas) to provide waste reception facilities is a bureaucratic edifice designed to test a hypothesis to solve a problem that wasn’t there in the first place. The marinas have to do a lot of paperwork to prove that they make the facilities available. The hypothesis was that more waste would be landed (instead of being thrown overboard) if the facilities were provided free (or at low cost). And I refuse to believe that, even 10 years ago, yotties were environmental vandals and just threw everything over the side. But the Marine Conservation Society had produced data from their Beachwatch survey that 14% of beach waste came from ships at sea. I find it significant that a year later, after the legislation had been introduced, they had re-assessed their data and concluded that the waste from ships (other than fishing vessels) was only 2%. So if all this bureaucratic nonsense halves the waste from ships, it will only reduce the flotsam on the beaches by 1%. Is that really worth the effort? We don’t see the bureaucratic groundswell going on, but be sure that it is just one more factor increasing our marina charges.

Which brings us neatly on to the subject of sea toilets! The truth is that women were not built for yachting – having said which, I have heard that the biggest single cause of death logged by US Coastguard is “FOA” or “Flies Open on Arrival”. But lets face it lads, many of us wouldn’t be able to go sailing unless our ladies can come too.

When my boat was built, I could see the way things were going, so I had a 15 gallon stainless holding tank installed – too big to go into the focsle after the deck was put on. To date it has not been used. For one thing, at that time, there was no standard for pump out fittings. There is now, although I cannot find a simple, clear explanation of how the installation works on the internet. My view used to be that I would start to cope with the problems of a holding tank when the regs required it. The Recreational Craft Directive now requires that all new boats over a certain size should have facilities for adding a holding tank at a later date. But so far as I can see, only lip service is being paid to this requirement, and the idea of a 3 gallon holding tank has to be a joke – surely?