(http://www.paddling.net/message/show...=344451#344730)

"Three times this week I've gone paddling in a local resevoir -
drinking water, no less. The lake wraps around some small hills so it
there are different places to go, the scenery changes, and you can
paddle 4 - 5 miles without much overlap. This evening before sunset the
water was like black oil - just so smooth and reflective it was like
paddling through the sky.

But I'm jumpin' mad. Every freakin' day I go there I pick up litter at
the put in and an occassional bag or can or styrofoam bait box out on
the water. Tonight, the weather was so nice there were dozens of people
along the lake fishing. And the litter was overwhelming.

The ultimate was the stream of litter that I paddled into. First a
potato chip bag - absolutely fresh - just dumped within minutes. Then 3
soda cans - on top of the water, they weren't in for long. Then a
plastic bag and more crap. One by one a take them and set them on my
spray skirt. I paddle up to the source of the effluent - 3 schmucks
fishing on the shore. 'Your stuff' - like the straight line from them
through each piece of trash wasn't obvious. No one answers. I get back
to the put-in I left exactly one hour earlier. The amount of trash was
incredible. I had cleaned it 100% before I put in.

All of this is from people fishing. There are no gas motors on the lake
and 99% of the use is fishing. I've seen a dozen kayakers over the
years there. Tonight I was one of three kayakers.

Some of you fish, I don't. Would you explain to me why people go to a
beautiful place to fish and turn it into a garbage dump? How f'n
retarded do you have to be to do this?

I swore before I wouldn't clean up because it is a sucker's game. Today
I was the sucker again but not tomorrow."

***

It happens because NOBODY GIVES A DAMN AND NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT, but
look on the bright side of it. Instead of looking at it as a DIRTY
PLAYGROUND, look at it as a CLEAN DUMPGROUND. Very similar to the glass
half empty or half full...

That's what I do with the bay where I launch the kayak. It's full of
floating GARBAGE AND OIL (motorboats compound the problem here), but I
look at it as a lightly polluted dumpground. And this attitude allows
me to still go out there and enjoy myself.

One day sooner rather than later the whole ocean will be like that and
we must get used to it. And there's another positive side to it: even
THE SHARK will be gone...