Clear Vision

It was his first patrol in Ventura County, and Matthew Philipp, a.k.a. “the Channel Keeper,” felt overwhelmed.

Driving into town last Wednesday from Santa Barbara, he spied a road project north of the Ventura River where sediment is spilling into the ocean. As he cruised Ventura Harbor that day in a patrol boat, the vessel sliced through mysterious oil slicks. Storm drains disgorged coffee-colored silt. Intermittent sewage leaks dribbled from 1,500 moored boats. And in the distance, oil platforms and lumbering freighters dotted the Santa Barbara Channel.

“It just looks like there’s an endless amount of issues. Frankly, we need to spend time down here,” Philipp said.

The Santa Barbara Channel has a new guardian. His beat spans 70 miles from Point Mugu to Point Conception. He is armed with a camera and radio and a keen eye for polluters. And he is backed by a growing network of volunteers, lawyers and activists who function like a shadow law enforcement agency to halt activities that muck up the ocean.

Collectively, the nonprofit program that Philipp runs is called ChannelKeeper. It was launched this summer in Santa Barbara by the Environmental Defense Center, which hired Philipp and pays his salary, to link the community to marine protection.

“We wanted to respond to the beach closure situations in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in a way that engages the citizenry directly in taking care of their coastal watersheds and marine environment,” said Greg Helms, spokesman for the Environmental Defense Center.

The ChannelKeeper program is modeled after similar efforts in the San Francisco, Santa Monica and San Diego bays. They were launched in the wake of successes by citizen watchdogs who took to the Hudson River in the 1980s to clean up pollution from New York City.

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ChannelKeeper will work to protect marine sanctuaries, coastal estuaries, bays, wetlands, creeks and watersheds from illegal dumping and spills. Often, the groups work with public-interest law firms to bring lawsuits to force compliance with state and federal clean-water laws.

“You can’t always count on government to do the job. This is complementary to other citizen watchdog groups and others concerned with water quality and the oceans,” Philipp said. “Part of our job is to make sure government is doing what we pay them taxes to do.”

For now, ChannelKeeper is still getting organized. Work has consisted largely of launching a Web site and reaching out to the community. Volunteers are being recruited to perform tasks ranging from office support to boat skippers to coordinating fund-raising.

For now, ocean patrols are limited to near-shore duty, chiefly at Central Coast marinas using boats borrowed from fishermen, harbor patrols and research centers. That will change in mid-December, when Philipp said he expects to secure his own vessel, enabling him to patrol the ocean from the Channel Islands to Mugu Lagoon to Gaviota.

Eventually, volunteer crews supervised by Philipp will augment the patrols. As envisioned, volunteers will adopt sections of shore for cleanup, divers will inspect kelp beds, and operators of pleasure and fishing boats will count fish and take water samples. Anyone can get involved by reporting suspicious activity, including toxics poured down storm drains, illegal commercial fishing or sewage in the water, by calling a pollution hotline at (877) 4CA-COAST.

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As Coast Guardsman, Philipp, 29, was assigned to Long Beach and briefly patrolled the Ventura County coast in 1991. He returned to California after attending college on the East Coast to work on environmental restoration at Catalina Island.

“I was very excited about this job. In Southern California, people really have a passion for the ocean and people want to make a difference,” Philipp said. “This is a fascinating body of water, it’s a gem. I’ve been all over the Pacific, Marshall Islands, Hawaii, and the Channel Isles are so unique. This is a dream place.”