Do you want to enhance the performance of your vessel while decreasing your maintenance costs, improving your family’s safety and become more environmentally friendly? With diminishing fish industries, increased dead zones, extinct fish, harmful toxins and endangered species we need to learn how to be more eco-friendly and help in the prevention of polluting our wonderful oceans. Recreational boaters only cause a tiny portion of the marine environmental filth but you can still do you part and help out. Here are some easy steps for you as the boat owner to help keep the environment healthy for many more generations to come.
Improve you outboard
The best outboard is a four-cycle outboard or a direct-injection 2-stroke engine. These engines will save you a lot of money in the long haul. With older 2 stoke engines around 20% is wasted and discharged into the water and air.
Easy as 1-2-3
For all you diesel engine owners here is something simple and easy to implement right away. Commercial grade Biodiesel can be mixed with regular diesel at a low percentage of no more than twenty percent. The payback of the biodiesel can include safer fuel managing, better combustion, increase lubricity, and significant decline of pollutant discharge.
Filling your tank
Protect the water while you fill up your vessel. The easiest way to do this is to have an oil absorbing material around the nozzle by cutting out a hole in the middle for the actual fuel pump. This will help insure that no gas is spilt into the ocean water because of you.
Crankcase Ventilators
Newer lines of boats usually have these features but if you have an older boat you should install this piece of equipment pretty inexpensively. The crankcase ventilators will reduce oil leaks and improve air quality while enjoying your boat.
Best Bilge Socks
The best product for bilge socks is polymer when compared to polypropylene, cellulose, biological, or foam. Although polymer is a little more in price but the amount of positives prevail over the cost.
Stripping or Sanding Plans?
The material you sand off your boat usually has some harsh chemicals in it. Try using a dustless sander which sucks up the dust into a vacuum cleaner. This will eliminate dust flying around the docks and ending up in your oceans.
Anti-Freeze
Try switching to antifreeze made with propylene glycol, which is a less toxic substitute. Anti-freeze is 100% recyclable so please take advantage and dispose of properly.
No pump outs in water
Not only is it 100% disgusting it is illegal. Pump outs in the ocean create dead zones among marine life and pollute the ocean with hazardous bacteria. Make sure to report people who are not practicing pump out stations and do your part to keep it clean.
Manatees, Dolphins, Seals & Whales … Keep them alive!
Constantly be on the lookout for marine mammals in your area and stay back at least 100 meters from mammals and start to slow down within 400 meters when a whale is spotted. Always stay on the outside edges or the offshore side of mammal sightings to insure that you do not drive through the middle of the pod. Do not swim or feed the animals, they are unpredictable.
Ideas Taken from Clyde W. Ford author of Boat Green: 50 Steps Boaters Can Take to Save Our Waters (New Society Publishers, 2008) http://www.boatingworld.com/Articles/2008/April_2008/Departments/Smart_Boater_Going_Green.html
