Kayak Campaign for Cleaner Coast Ends at Scripps

With his ocean water samples and his cellular telephone, 48-year-old Joel Fogel on Wednesday completed his car-and-kayak campaign down the West Coast for clean water.

Paddling ashore at San Diego’s Scripps Pier just after 1 p.m. with an aching back, Fogel finished the most recent of his trademark kayak trips--this one beginning Sept. 23 when he paddled away from Seattle--to publicize the need for uniform water-quality testing along the nation’s shorelines.

On the way, Fogel took 200 samples of ocean water, which will now be tested at laboratories in San Diego and Atlantic City to determine just how dirty the water is along the West Coast. The water will be analyzed for fecal matter, heavy metals and nutrients.

He expects that the water will be proven pristine clean at some locations and putrid at others. And, moreover, he hopes his demonstration will help influence Congress to pass legislation to establish nationally uniform ocean water-quality testing criteria. The bill already has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate.

“Some states test the ocean water off their shorelines three times a day. Others only test them when they feel like it,” complained Fogel, who is somewhat obsessed about improvimg the quality of water for the sake of both beach-goers and marine life.

“Consequently, you can be swimming in filthy water because the state doesn’t want to check out its quality, and you don’t know it’s filthy, and you don’t know why you ended up with a sore throat,” Fogel said. “Or you can eat fish that’s been gulping down who-knows-what, and end up with a tumor 10 years from now because ocean pollution can come back to us on our plates.

“California is very conscientious about testing. Here, it’s not the problem of how often the samples are taken but how successful the state is in going after the polluters.”

Fogel, who lives in Somers Point, N.J., and is the national sales manager for a family-owned company that manufactures industrial and commercial refrigerators, first gained notoriety in 1970, when he paddled a kayak down the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Miami.

Along the way, he collected water samples for evaluation by the Department of the Interior--samples that showed how polluted the coastal waters were along the East Coast.

His trip helped promote the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and prompted reforms in the way public utilities handle their sewage discharge. When he paddled the same route last year--on the 20th anniversary of his first kayak campaign--he said he found the waters dramatically cleaner.

Last month, with the nation still in want of uniform federal water quality testing, Fogel turned his attention to the West Coast.

No longer young and ailing from a bad back, Fogel this time combined the waterways with the highways, kayaking part-time to reach targets along the coast and relying on his “land-support vehicle” to hopscotch him ahead at other times.

He figured he paddled up to eight or 10 hours a day on good days, and altogether paddled about half of the 1,300 miles between Seattle and San Diego. On Wednesday, for instance, he drove down from Orange County, where he landed on Tuesday, and took off from the San Onofre State Beach, paddling about 20 miles to his final destination: the pier at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where his efforts were applauded.

“Our beaches are a natural treasure,” said David Skelly, a coastal engineer at Scripps and a member of the Surfrider Foundation, which promotes clean ocean waters. “We shouldn’t let the beaches get polluted and trashy, no more than we would allow the Washington Monument to get trashy and polluted.”

Scripps, however, is not involved in testing and analyzing Fogel’s water samples. It simply allowed Fogel to pull up to its pier.

Fogel had always been charmed by the ocean--he worked as a lifeguard back home and studied marine zoology at the University of Hawaii.

“People might say about me, ‘He’s a crazy dude.’ Well, I’m a surfer at heart. I don’t love taking water samples. I just love the sea, and I want it protected.

“I celebrated my 48th birthday (on Tuesday). I’ve got five kids, and my wife said, ‘Pappa, leave this for the younger guys. Stay at home and let me rub your back.’

“I told her, if the younger guys were as interested in this as I am, I would. But they’re not.”

If Fogel is a bit eccentric in his lobbying efforts, it’s not going unnoticed. “Unfortunately, sometimes people have to come up with creative ideas to focus attention on their cause,” said Mark Brown, administrative assistant to U.S. Rep. William Hughes (D-New Jersey), who authored the current legislation on water quality testing. “I don’t think what Fogel is doing shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s being noticed by people, and the press and, in turn, by senators.”

Fogel has a back-up plan if the Senate doesn’t pass the so-called Beach Bill, or Beach Environmental Assessment Closure and Health Act.

If it doesn’t get through Congress this year, he said, then next year he will paddle the entire length of the Mississippi River.