Yes, boaters can make a big difference when we put our minds to it!
Every year, volunteer divers clean the bottom of Avalon Harbor of trash and treasures, most of which have fallen off boats. Photo, Explorers Photography
Every year, volunteer divers clean the bottom of Avalon Harbor of trash and treasures, most of which have fallen off boats. Photo, Explorers Photography
Amid the turbulence that seems to surround us these days, it can be all too easy to pull away from engagement and, well, just go boating. We’re lucky to have such a great way to escape. But let’s meet some very avid boaters who’ve taken a different and very generous approach, focusing their energies and knowledge of the water on passion projects that have resulted in local wins for their communities and for the environment. — THE EDITORS
Each item recovered is inspected and cataloged. In most cases, divers can keep anything they find. Photo, Explorers Photography
Imagine the excitement of finding an espresso machine on the bottom of a harbor. Having rested underwater for the better part of year, it sports some marine growth and rust like the stroller and bottle of vodka found in the watery depths nearby. Trash to some but treasure to others, these objects were recovered in the annual Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup of 2026 based on the 22-mile-long island of Catalina off the coast of Southern California. Dave Satossky, general manager of Catalina Divers Supply, is the event’s chair and proudly runs through a list of this year’s bounty and notes, “You’d be surprised what falls off a boat.”
Most recently held on February 21, this popular SoCal diving event celebrated its 44th consecutive year since its launch in 1982. It’s the only time that scuba diving is allowed in the actual harbor and below the moorings where visiting boats tie up cheek by jowl, especially on busy weekends. Rain or shine, the cleanup draws divers wanting to give back. “In 2026, we collected 1,200 pounds of trash made up of 1,952 pieces of debris,” says Satossky.
This year’s trash may have been last year’s treasure. “There were the usual fishing poles, towels, and four or five iPhones,” says Nicole Hohenstein, treasurer of the Avalon Rotary Foundation, a co-sponsor of the venture. “We also had a report of someone finding a Rolex. In fact, it was the same guy who found the bottle of vodka!” Lucky diver.
This year, 232 divers gathered on the waterfront of the island’s picturesque town. Along with volunteers working in kayak patrol or on land logistics, the divers took on trash collecting at three locations including Green Pier, Step Beach, and Casino Point. This February, the weather was unsettled – snotty, some would say – with choppy wavelets and a breeze. The divers were in the water and on the hunt by 9:30 a.m., fins kicking up the silt in the chilly, murky water. The dives are generally no deeper than 40 feet, but the water temperature often hovers around 60 F, so bundling up afterward and wrapping frozen fingers around a cup of hot chocolate can be reward enough.
Every item recovered is checked for marine life like starfish or octopuses that are carefully removed and returned to the water. This year, the count of tiny lives saved was 110. Every piece is cataloged, then laid out for inspection. Unless something is deemed valuable, like a wallet, the divers can keep their hard-won prizes. Years past have delivered odd gems like outboard engine covers, starting batteries, bikes, and even a barnacle-encrusted sewing machine – each piece telling the story of a day that had gone very wrong for a past boater.
Divers register for a fee of $60 to $80, with event proceeds split between the University of Southern California Hyperbaric Chamber, a premier emergency recompression facility, and Avalon Beautiful, which is raising funds for the restoration of the Casino Point Dive Park. This year, $23,000 was raised and more than $30,000 of raffle prizes and giveaways distributed. Although divers come from all over, many of the volunteers who make this event possible call Catalina home, Satossky said, “I moved here from San Clemente on the mainland seven years ago. It’s paradise.”
Next year’s cleanup will be February 19 with the addition of an inaugural film festival. Once again, tanks will clang on the jetty, regulators will hiss as they’re tested on the point, and divers will gear up to lend a hand to protect the diverse ecology sheltered in this beloved crescent-shaped cove of Catalina Island. — ZUZANA PROCHAZKA
Scuba diving is prohibited in Catalina’s Avalon Harbor all but the one day a year when divers come together for the Avalon Harbor Underwater Cleanup.
What does future success look like for Nicolette Mariano? (pictured at top) “A solid crew harvesting 15,000 to 25,000 oysters a week, having my own hatchery on the river, offering farm tours, a hands-on summer camp or aquaculture training program – introducing the next generation to sustainable seafood.”
Those familiar with Florida’s Indian River Lagoon know that things have gotten bad. Really bad. Once a bountiful fishery home to more than 2,200 animal species, the 156-mile-long estuary has finally succumbed to decades of population growth and mismanagement, with harmful algae blooms, seagrass die-offs, and its once gin-clear water turning murky brown as a result.
But for Nicolette Mariano, aquaculture biologist and founder of Treasure Coast Shellfish, the waterway’s woes are just one more reason to follow her passion and make a positive impact along the way. Located just south of Sebastian Inlet and bathed in the briny waters of the Atlantic, Treasure Coast Shellfish is the first and southernmost commercial floating oyster farm in the Indian River and home to nearly 1.2 million of the delectable bivalves, which Mariano and her team raise from seedlings (pinky-nail size or smaller) to full-grown premium specimens destined for restaurants and raw bars across the Southeastern U.S. Each oyster filters approximately 50 gallons of water a day, so some quick math says that her farm cleans a staggering 60 million gallons of water every day!
Born in the coastal town of Stuart, Florida, Mariano spent much of her early childhood in, on, or around the water – mostly on the Indian River Lagoon, or IRL, where her family spent their weekends on watercraft of all kinds along the causeways that span the lagoon. Summer Gulf Stream crossings to the Bahamas cemented her love for boating.
By the second grade, she was attending summer camps at the Environmental Studies Center in Jensen Beach, where she spent countless days exploring and learning about the IRL aboard the River Scout, its 33-foot floating classroom. Run by the Martin County School District, the Environmental Studies Center provides hands-on learning experiences for students in the district, with a focus on the Indian River Lagoon, Hutchinson Island beaches, mangrove communities, freshwater habitats, and wetlands. “The Environmental Studies Center was and continues to be such a special part of my life,” says Mariano. “I don’t know if I would have found my career path without it.”
By age 14, she was volunteering at the Florida Oceanographic Coastal Center, where she discovered the world of shellfish aquaculture after stumbling upon a destroyed shellfish hatchery while cleaning up a nature trail in the wake of Hurricane Frances. At the Florida Institute of Technology she majored in aquaculture, the ancient practice of breeding, raising, and harvesting fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants, and took her first official course in seamanship. Upon graduation, she worked oyster farms in New England and Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Then came COVID, the ultimate disrupter of our time. “I was laid off from the hatchery on March 26, 2020, and Treasure Coast Shellfish was started on March 27,” Mariano recalls with a laugh. She bought her first boat, a 19-foot modified Hurricane deckboat with a 90-horse Johnson two-stroke outboard, and learned the ins and outs of being your own marine mechanic. From changing trailer cross members on the side of the highway to learning the idiosyncrasies of the old but always reliable Johnson, she’s become a knowledgeable boater and loves it.
She built underwater “rack and bag” farming gear (a basic intertidal method that requires more diving and labor than the advanced floating cages she uses now), obtained a plot of water from a group of local clam farmers, and went to work. And work she has, as in manual labor from sunup to sundown. Known by most on the commercial docks as one of the hardest-working people on the water, Mariano slowly built her business from a small sublease into her own 7-acre farm with 588 floating cages, multiple workboats, a dedicated oyster nursery, processing facility, and team of farm hands that share the same excitement for the future of sustainable seafood as she does.
None of this has been easy, and the temptation to simply give up in favor of a more stable paycheck has been tough to ignore on many occasions. Like a field of potatoes in Idaho, oysters are a crop in a perpetual state of uncertainty. From mortality events exacerbated by heat and drought to hurricanes that destroy thousands of dollars’ worth of gear, it can often seem as though oyster farming is a big game of one step forward and two steps back.
So with a disproportional amount of work for reward and the cards seemingly always stacked against her, most would ask, why do it? “It’s been amazing to see the number of species recruiting on the farm. When I started, it was like a desert with a tumbleweed rolling by. Now, just a few feet under the surface are seahorses, baby stone crabs, spiny lobster, mangrove snapper and sheepshead, and a multitude of microorganisms like amphipods and skeleton shrimp that have found refuge on the farm, despite their native seagrass nurseries all but gone.”
— MIKE LONGMAN
Moriwaki cleans out the wetlands near the departure deck that extends over the beach where people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed and exiled in 1942.
Across the water from Seattle, on the western shore of the Salish Sea, lies a quiet beach. Boaters approaching by water will encounter a few stray pilings and a stretch of rocky sand covered with seagrass. Farther up on the bluff, an artful cluster of low structures and signage indicates that this is a place for reflection.
In 1942, the waterfront here witnessed a dark chapter. In the wake of the Japanese attack on the American naval fleet stationed in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry – most U.S. citizens – to move to “war relocation camps.” Hundreds of residents of Bainbridge Island, a small city island in western Washington, gathered on the Eagledale Ferry Dock on a cold March morning, with few possessions in hand, waiting for transport away from the coast. Many were the strawberry farmers who, for decades, had used the area’s “mosquito fleet” of private boats to bring their crops to the cities in Puget Sound.
The ferry dock is gone, but today a western red cedar tree still overlooks the site. This is sacred ground to Clarence Moriwaki, whose passion and hard work helped get this waterfront cleaned up and protected. A third-generation Japanese American, Moriwaki grew up exploring Moses Lake in eastern Washington by canoe and paddleboats. He and his parents lived and farmed on the other side of the Columbia River, which was the limit of the president’s West Coast exclusion zone, and so they were exempt from removal. The small inland Moses Lake community of his youth was “pretty Norman Rockwell,” he recalls. By age 12, he was the state’s youngest Eagle Scout, attracted by conservation issues.
It wasn’t until he attended the University of Washington in Seattle when Moriwaki investigated his heritage. “I met other Japanese American kids,” he remembered. “They asked where my parents went to camp. I said, ‘I’m a farmer’s kid. We didn’t have time for camp.’ And they said, ‘Concentration camp, you moron’ … I had no idea what they were talking about.” When Moriwaki asked his dad about his silence on the topic, “he paused for a while, then replied, ‘Gaman,’ a Japanese word for bearing the unbearable. You hold it within.”
In 1997, after serving on the city council of Tukwila, Washington, Moriwaki moved to Bainbridge Island, drawn by its natural beauty, sense of community, and strong connection to the water and boating. “The best decision of my life,” he recalls. Here he met Japanese Americans who’d been forcibly removed as children in 1942. After the war, about half returned to Bainbridge Island.
Moriwaki decided to honor those 276 residents. He had a lot of energy for volunteer work, even as he worked as a media relations specialist for the Sound Transit public transportation agency. He served as a trustee and president of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community and helped found the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association. He spearheaded fundraising to purchase 50 acres at the site of the Eagledale Ferry Dock, then got to work cleaning up what had been neglected for many years. He organized the site’s environmental remediation, making sure to preserve the wetland for water retention and filtration.
The Memorial Wall was opened to the public in 2011. Every February, Moriwaki still pulls on his boots and wades through the wetland for hours, removing excess plant growth and preparing it for the annual “Day of Remembrance” ceremony.
The structures of the Exclusion Memorial blend exhibits into the natural environment starting with an undulating story wall. Constructed of cedar (an iconic Northwest wood), granite, and basalt, the wall winds through what is now a lush landscape of ferns and fir trees, listing the names of the 276 uprooted Bainbridge Island residents. Each panel features artwork depicting life on the island, along with quotes from those who experienced removal. Strings of origami brought by visitors from all over the world hang from the structures.
The wall leads to a departure deck extending over the beach where residents left behind their homes, businesses, and community to board a ferry, bound for exile and confinement in an unknown location. It was important to Moriwaki to include the imprints of footsteps from both adults and children that end abruptly at the water’s edge.
In 2022, Moriwaki won a Bainbridge City Council race and now serves as mayor. Still, the Exclusion Memorial, he says, “was my life and my heart. It was every day of my life for 25 years.” During his professional career, he’s turned down opportunities to work in larger cities in favor of remaining in the place where he feels a strong connection to the community and to the sea. — LISA MIGHETTO
Do you know a boater whose selfless work has improved their community, the environment, or the lives of others? Send us an email at Magazine@BoatUS.com with “Heroes” in the subject line and tell us about them. We’ll take it from there.
Published: June 2026
BoatUS Magazine
Award-winning BoatUS Magazine is the official publication of Boat Owners Association of The United States. The magazine provides boating skills, DIY maintenance, safety, news and more from top experts.