Relative to their humble origins and deceivingly happy disposition, barnacles are a boat owner’s worst nightmare, their removal being a never-ending, very expensive obligation.
They are the bane of saltwater sailors thanks to their miracle glue that adheres to virtually any surface underwater, hangs on under extremes of pressure, cannot be dissolved by acids, alkalis or protein solvents and withstands temperatures of up to 166 degrees Celsius.
Before Rachel Carson rang alarm bells in her landmark book The Sea Around Us, the powerful insecticide DDT was used effectively against barnacles in many anti-fouling paints, and since its banning, tin worked pretty well until it, too, was banned (ironically to protect another shell – the oyster!). Nowadays, our anti-fouling paints are largely dependent on cuprous oxide, which continues to give fair protection for as long as a year or more (depending on quality and type, paint thickness, region, season etc).
The humble barnacle had evolution’s father, Charles Darwin, so fascinated that he collected 10,000 specimens and spent eight years classifying and describing them but failed to say whether the diabolical crustaceans evolved just to challenge human ingenuity in fighting them or were specifically intended to create bureaucracies like Environmental Protection Agencies. Whatever the truth, his monographs on the subject continue to serve as reliable scholarly references to this day.
In the days before the EPA banned in-water removal of barnacles, us sailors dived on our own boats to scrape greater efficiencies into our shell-encrusted propellers and any one of us could have told the bureaucrats that fish love freshly scraped barnacles.
On countless occasions, whilst scraping my propeller, I have been surrounded by schools of ravenous fish snapping at their exposed flesh, becoming so frenetic in their pursuit of yummy morsels that my arms and legs have been nipped where shell fragments fell. And let me tell you, the teeth of a medium sized bream are definitely not blunt.
But lawmakers know what fish like better than fish because they legislated against feeding them freshly opened barnacles many years ago. They effectively denied them a rich source of food whose larvae is part of plankton which is the first link in a food chain that nourishes all creatures of the sea, either directly or indirectly. It seems almost criminal – not to say expensive – that we must slip our vessels just to scrape barnacles into an EPA-compliant drain that guarantees they will never reach the sea alive.
This law makes even less sense when it is remembered that the first site of barnacle-encrustation is always our propellers whose protective paint wears off a couple of months after slipping whilst the remaining underwater body of the vessel stays shell-free for the rest of the anti-fouling’s life.
When barnacles start growing on bare metal, their accumulation can be spectacularly rapid, new shell starting to grow just two or three days after their predecessor’s removal. Within a couple of weeks, shell is adult enough to seriously impede the prop’s efficiency until it eventually prevents propulsion altogether: And when a vessel can’t move, how is her owner expected to steam her to a compliant haul-out yard without first scraping off the barnacles? Recently, a fellow careened his small yacht on a beach, ignorant of its illegality. Out of nowhere, two uniformed officials arrived and fined him $800 plus beach clean-up fees (although he had not actually started work yet).
They then exercised a little ritual humiliation by ordering him to pick up his tin of anti-fouling and read its list of warnings aloud to prove beyond doubt that he could not have been ignorant of the law. And, sure enough, there it was, a warning saying that, ‘This product contains certain material that may be detrimental to the marine environment’: then it goes on to warn against leaving a mess behind. Interestingly, though, it also suggests the use of sand to absorb a spill!
Hello?
Let’s back-up a minute here: If a product is, by its own admission, detrimental to the marine environment, how did it gain EPA approval in the first place? And as long as it is an approved product, why the paranoia about drips falling onto a tidal flat? Not that I would encourage such habits, but where’s the logic here?
During the early 1970s, when it seemed the entire Great Barrier Reef would be consumed by the Crown of Thorns Starfish, government figures were published showing the amount of toxins released into Queensland’s waterways from urban, rural and city run-off.
I forget all the details, but for the Burdekin region alone the figure was in the thousand of tons per annum. Obviously something had to be done and the idea of an environmental police force under a marine park mandate seemed inevitable and even admirable as long as mankind remains determined to destroy his natural surroundings.
Unfortunately the legislative process over the past few decades has eliminated something that was once a cherished foundation stone of democracy, namely, the assumption of innocence. You can commit murder and be given the benefit of the doubt until proven guilty, but you cannot do anything to the environment without fear of being deemed guilty, especially if you happen to own a boat. Look at an example used by the EPA itself when outlining the extent of its power to a group of officers.
The example is this: If you see a person pick up a bucket of water on one side of his boat then walk to other side and pour it back into the waterway, that person can be deemed to be changing the chemical characteristics of the waterway and be fined accordingly.
How’s that for fair and just regulation? The assumption of guilt in the complete absence of criminal behaviour is apparently acceptable to our so-called democratic governments. Isn’t this a little like saying, ‘You knew the dead person so, ipso facto, you must have murdered him.’
In the case of anti-fouling paint, we not only have undemocratic principles at work, but we also have unbelievable hypocrisy in a product that is EPA-compliant and is legally sold despite a label warning of its detrimental impact on the marine environment. Isn’t this blatant favouritism towards industrialists who can do what they like while their customers are heavily fined?
Is it any wonder that people take a jaundiced view of regulations? Our politicians need to preserve democratic principles by bringing their bureaucrats to heel. Laws should be promulgated that endear respect and trust with more emphasis on education and less on prosecution. Deeming estranges us all. It is a cancer that eats away at good resolve and when mixed with massive hypocrisy it is pure poison.
Meanwhile, the archenemy of all waterways – land run-off by the thousands of tons, seems to have become a forgotten cause. What’s the problem – too many non-sailing voters?
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Recently, a fellow careened his small yacht on a beach, ignorant of its illegality. Out of nowhere, two uniformed officials arrived and fined him $800 plus beach clean-up fees (although he had not actually started work yet). 
