Keeping the Trash at Bay : Water-Cleaning Vessel Is Unveiled

Picture a crew of workers cleaning the streets of an entire city--with push brooms. That, Bill Hamilton said, is practically how Newport Beach has been cleaning its popular bay, the largest pleasure-boat harbor on the West Coast. In and along the 32 miles of waterway, one guy in a dinghy fishes out 600 cubic yards of trash each year with a pool skimmer.

After 10 years of looking out his waterfront Cannery Restaurant with such flotsam as beer cans and cigarette butts drifting by the dining tables, Hamilton got to thinking about this strange dichotomy: wealthy, resort town with several yacht clubs and a 9,000-slip harbor. And one guy with a pool net? It made no sense.

An engineer by trade and an inventor at heart, Hamilton finally took pencil to paper last fall and sketched out a prototype for the Water Rake, a 19-foot-long catamaran that is as simple as it is promising.

At a breakfast gathering Wednesday at the Balboa Bay Club, the restaurateur unveiled the white, pontooned garbage sweeper at a dockside demonstration to hosannas from about 75 boaters, the mayor and harbor officials. On June 3, the city’s annual Clean Harbor Day, an event dreamed up years ago by Hamilton at which hundreds of volunteers collect garbage from the bay, Hamilton will loan the Water Rake to Newport Beach.

“We are hoping, like Bill is hoping, that it will be a real efficient way to clean the bay,” said Tony Mellum, Newport Beach’s tideland administrator. “Right now we have a fellow in a skiff with a pool scoop, and if (the Water Rake) is effective, it will change the way we clean harbors.”

It is rather mundane looking, this 1,600-pound SS Trash, driven by two outboard engines for better maneuvering in tight spots, hauling a large bin aft for the rubbish. Floating garbage is “raked” from a foot beneath the surface by a multi-strand conveyor belt at the front of the boat. The conveyor belt, which has plastic-coated metal strands, then carries the junk to the hoppers at the back end.

Hamilton designed it, and partner Art Gronsky built it in his cavernous old boatyard next door to the Cannery.

The two key engineering tricks that make the Water Rake “a breakthrough,” Hamilton said, are the conveyor belt--so smooth it picks up everything from a cigarette butt to a 10-foot-long timber--and the power behind it: a quiet Johnson motor whose propeller has been replaced by a safer, cleaner and more controllable hydraulic device.

“I wanted to design something that was quiet, simple and yet rugged and effective,” Hamilton said, “and I think the essence of engineering is simplicity. You don’t want to put a lot of gadgets on there and make it complicated.”

A married father and grandfather who made his fortune manufacturing metal industrial equipment at plants in Chicago, Los Angeles and Orange County, Hamilton made one false start in his quest to design a bay sweeper a few months back. He spent 2 months converting his own catamaran in a “quick and dirty” job that cost him $2,000 but taught him important lessons. He had the right idea, but the sweeper had to be quieter so boaters didn’t gripe about all the noise.

In return for giving the $20,000 Water Rake to Newport Beach, Hamilton receives free testing rights to work out whatever bugs may exist for the next year. The city worker who now rides around in the dinghy will get to motor around in the Rake.

“He’s not going to lose his job, he’s just going to do it 10 times more efficiently,” Hamilton said of the harbor cleaners from the marine department who take turns at the task.

Hamilton said Newport Beach is “really back in the dark ages for harbor cleanup. But it’s not just here. It’s true of most harbors.”

That is why the 64-year-old Hamilton, who allegedly retired when he bought the Cannery and Malarky’s Irish Pub several years ago, is excited about the prospect of marketing the water sweepers. The price would be around $35,000 each, he said.

A spokesman for the Greater Newport Harbor Area Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored the Wednesday morning breakfast, said the Water Rake’s white, blank sides could be sold as advertising space to pay the cost of the boat’s maintenance.

Now, Marina del Rey is said to be interested in the Water Rake, and the partners have a patent pending on the harbor sweeper. Hamilton and Gronsky also are working to convert the rake into a device that also would clean up small-scale oil spills, opening another market for the invention.

“I can pick up an injured bird with this thing from an oil spill without a scratch,” said Hamilton, beaming with pride at the thought. “I think I could pick up a body with it, though I don’t know that I should try.”