Tips on Volunteering for Boaters and Water Lovers
I must admit, when I got started in the river-rat business, I didn’t have a plan. Things just sort of happened. New to the area, I simply attended a meeting, mostly out of curiosity.
People there were friendly, honestly friendly. It wasn’t the professionally smiley-suited-up, political way I was used to in the Washington, DC, power scene. I found people here on the Chesapeake more casual, relaxed, less job-driven, dare I say, because they wanted to sneak out of work early to get in a boat, walk a shoreline, go fishing, go crabbing, race a sailboat, or float along in a kayak. I mean, I was the only guy at that meeting in a suit and tie. There was something different here… it had to be the water.
One thing led to another. They somehow found out I was a journalist. Maybe it was the way I asked questions and scribbled down the speaker’s answers. They found out I knew a thing or three about environmental stuff from covering the EPA. Next thing I knew, I had volunteered to be on the board as the communications guy for a nonprofit I’d never heard of: the nation’s oldest river group, the Severn River Association (SRA), founded in 1911.
Turns out that lack of a plan created a slew of new opportunities, via volunteering, and even better, I was meeting new friends, new mentors. It was all set in motion by simply saying, “Sure, I can help with that.” Next thing I knew I was one of many volunteers helping build SRA’s reputation with watershed and science-based programs that relied on volunteers and citizen scientists.
The precious time volunteers offer goes a lot deeper and a lot farther than the three hours spent on a Saturday morning picking up trash along a creek bed. Connections are made; volunteers meet volunteers. It’s volunteers that make things happen.
That certainly was the case at SRA. We created the most robust water-quality monitoring program in the Bay (at one time 52 stations a week), and it was all due to the more than 60 volunteers who donated their time to track the health of the Severn River—on weekday mornings because they are delightfully unencumbered with day jobs.
At all nonprofits there are many non-water roles where volunteers can shine, such as in advocacy. They’ll write letters, attend meetings, lobby legislators, and raise a bit of a ruckus over critical issues. For watershed groups, a big issue is mowing down forests to build new strip malls or letting developers create mud-floods of stormwater that bury our grasses and oysters.
Other volunteers offer their accounting and financial expertise, legal advice, and gatekeeper functions. Others write checks. These are all backbone functions for nonprofits; they’re mostly all run by volunteers. So, there’s a lot of opportunity.
Why volunteer?
For one of our volunteer boat captains, Steve Small, a four-year water quality vet from the Pendennis Mount East Community, “It’s about giving back to your community. It creates a sense of purpose.” But there are also other joys: “fun jobs, meeting people, physical activity, making oneself useful, and staying busy and connected.”
He echoes the comments of dozens of other volunteers who are now quality monitoring veterans certified by the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative. They know what a dead zone is and how to define it in terms of dissolved oxygen in the water. They know algae blooms. They can identify cormorants; ospreys; night, green, and blue herons; kingfishers; eagles; vultures; and the occasional muskrat, snapping turtles, and beaver. They all understand why Tycho Brahe is our patron saint of data collectors.
Where to start?
One of the coolest on-the-water volunteer opportunities beckons at the top of the Bay in Havre de Grace. It’s a great experience for water rats who like to self-propel across the water. It’s all about kayaks and underwater grasses, the fabled submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). The Havre de Grace Maritime Museum needs volunteers to help track the expansion/decline of acres of underwater grasses in the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay.
You’ll be working on a bonafide science project. But you’re also going to be enjoying the great outdoors, meeting new friends, and getting exercise and sunshine as you paddle out in kayaks and canoes, which are the perfect tool for this assignment. Powered craft can’t navigate through the thick layers of grasses in shallow waters, so it’s up to the paddlers out there.
Contact Havre de Grace Maritime Museum.
I know how rewarding and enjoyable tracking SAV can be. An SRA board member, the renowned John Page Williams, took me on a tour of the river and turned me into a grass geek. Finding my first grass patch was such a thrill, drifting along the shoreline, staring at the sun-reflected greenish water, and boom, there it was, a thick bed of grass reaching for the sun just under the surface. A very cool experience indeed.
With help from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), I shared my newfound knowledge with an eager team of volunteer kayakers that we dubbed the “SAV Navy.” For four years, our ‘Navy’ tracked the return of our long-lost grasses, identifying species, and getting GPS fixes on where the grasses are expanding. Sadly, SRA no longer hosts this program, but while it lasted, we created a network of 30 to 40 volunteer paddlers who are still spreading the word about the crucial role our grasses play in the Bay’s ecology.
Tracking these grasses is important work because they are crucial to the recovery and health of the Chesapeake. They provide food and shelter for fish, crabs, waterfowl; they add oxygen to the water; they protect shorelines from erosion; they filter sediment, and they capture carbon.
To join an SAV program near you, contact the Chesapeake Bay SAV Watchers.
Why volunteer to study the river?
Watershed Steward grad and Palisades Community resident, Ann Lister, joined the ‘SAV Navy’ to study first-hand how stormwater runoff harms our waterways. For Ann and her paddling pals, the ‘Navy’ was “also a great way to have a reason to kayak with neighbors, but at the same time it was challenging to try to determine the species of grasses we’d find.”
Later she joined the water-quality monitoring team. Reflecting on her weekly tours of her river, she said tracking water quality “gave me another chance to connect and meet people who also value the quality of water. I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun I had with the other delightful volunteers while collecting valuable data.”
Old Severna Park resident, Ann Bangert, raised her hand and joined our water-quality team because for her, “everything is river-oriented. Having grown up on the river, I watched the decline and now, hopefully, the recovery. We all need to be involved.”
The thing that makes this kind of volunteering so rewarding is that it gives you/me/everyone more than just a sense of purpose by helping DNR study a waterway. We’re all getting smarter, too. Staff and volunteers show up at 9 a.m. We’re all rookies when we first get in the boat. With a bit of training, a bit of gear, and a scientific datasheet, we’ve suddenly graduated to becoming citizen scientists! It’s also just a lot of fun.
Another volunteer from Palisades, Ted Delaplaine, was just helping his elderly neighbors struggle with heavy bags of oyster spat-on-shell. “They were painstakingly delivering oysters to neighbors. It was obvious that it was too much for them,” so Ted jumped in to help. Next thing he knew he was the local MGO distributor for a statewide network of volunteer oyster growers. He also suddenly found himself on the SRA board promoting oyster restoration and guiding the group forward.
If you have access to a pier, contact the MGO program.
There are also many land-based ways to help your favorite river, stream, creek, watershed. For example, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay sponsors springtime cleanup days, usually around Earth Day (April 22). It’s a great event for families, boy scouts, girl scouts, communities, high schoolers, and even US Naval Academy Midshipmen.
You can help your community build a rain garden or plant marsh grasses to put the final touches on a living shoreline. By donating a couple of hours, you’re getting messy and dirty, enjoying a donut, maybe a sandwich, rubbing elbows with your neighbors, defending the environment, and having fun.
Contact the Alliance.
Note about getting started.
Do a bit of local research to identify nonprofits that are guardians of a river, trail, creek, beach, or forest that intrigues you. Don’t flood them with calls out of the blue. It’s best to be patient and respond to their needs, which are usually seasonal or for a special project. First, get on a group’s email/newsletter list and respond when they put out a call for volunteers.
About the Author: Thomas Guay, a true river rat and co-founder of Operation Osprey on the Severn River, is recruiting volunteer osprey watchers for the 2025 season. He is also a musicioner with the Eastport Oyster Boys and the author of the historical novel, “Chesapeake Bound,” which will be released by McBooks Press in April.
