Making a SPLASH across the South Shore

Diesel exhaust from nearby boatyards suffused the air as Don Harris cruised north in a 27-foot Carolina skiff up Freeport Creek, past a pair of mute swans that he calls Chip and Ophelia, the towering smokestacks of Freeport Power Plant No. 2, a Town of Hempstead dredging barge and hundreds of boats, many sleek and modern, others abandoned, rotting hulks sinking into the murky water.

It was a recent cloudy Friday, and Harris was eager to check on a boom used to collect garbage at the head of Freeport Creek, where a drainage culvert lets out into the waterway.

Harris, 51, a freelance boat captain, is vice president of the Freeport-based Operation SPLASH (Stop Polluting Littering And Save Harbors), a 2,000-member nonprofit environmental group that has picked up more than a million pounds of garbage from the wetlands that hug the South Shore over the past two decades.

Harris noted that most anything that people toss from their cars onto local streets –– from cigarette butts to plastic water bottles –– winds up in the wetlands and bays via dozens of drains that snake underground across the South Shore. SPLASH, a grass-roots, hands-on organization, is committed to cleaning up the mess.

“It’s an inexpensive solution to waterfront pollution through community involvement and individual participation,” said Harris, one of the organization’s founding members.

Harris, who has made his home in Freeport for 12 years, grimaced as he moored the skiff to the floating wooden dock around the garbage boom, just off South Main Street in Freeport. Trash covered the water, which was nearly as brown and viscous as oil. Harris grabbed a net, pulled in trash and deposited it in a plastic can on the dock. Soon he was off, back down Freeport Creek, away from the boatyards and toward the Spartina marsh grass islands that line the waterway farther south, before he headed northwest through Hudson Channel to the Town of Hempstead’s Guy Lombardo Marina, where SPLASH keeps two Carolina skiffs.