Indian Harbor Beach retiree Dennis Mayo stood like a 19th century harpooner, hefting an 18-foot hollow plastic pole in the bow of a pontoon boat off the east shore of Merritt Island.
And when the skipper, U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Bill Leahy of Stuart, steered the boat into just the right position, Mayo, 67, lunged and jabbed the pole straight down into the bottom of the pea soup-colored Indian River Lagoon. And he disappeared from the crew’s sight.
“Wow, that’s deep. Careful, Dennis!” shouted Caity Savoia, 28, of Eau Gallie, lead scientist with the nonprofit Marine Resources Council.
Mayo popped up, smiling. No, he didn’t fall in. But that last spot was deeper than 18 feet and had most of the pole in the water.
“I’m still not reaching bottom,” Mayo said.
Unlike the historic harpooner, Mayo wasn’t aiming for a whale. He was going for muck, the black ooze composed of dead leaves, algae and other plants left rotting for decades on the lagoon bottom. And on this spot near Milford Point, any muck lay deeper than the handmade pole could measure.
This was the Nov. 14 cruise of the Muck Finders, a team of area residents who help Savoia document for the Brevard County Natural Resource Management Department just how thick the muck is at hundreds of points in the county’s section of the 156-mile ailing lagoon. Mayo and Leahy are part of the all-volunteer team.
“I wanted to be active after I retired (in 2016),” Mayo said. “I wanted to give back to the community.”
Savoia said Mayo is her most consistent and regular volunteer.
Muck is a problem, county officials say, because it clouds waters that were clearer decades ago and releases nitrogen and phosphorous into the water.
Those nutrients nourish algae into blooming, killing off seagrass by blocking sunlight and choking off oxygen from fish and other marine animals. And then the algae dies and becomes more muck.
At about 100 other points east of Merritt Island, Mayo called off various thicknesses of muck, from fractions of an inch thick to several inches.
“We’ve seen 3 meters of muck in some places,” Savoia said.
But one point’s thickness doesn’t mean the same for the next point, Mayo said.
“You’ll have some areas where the muck is so deep, and then all of a sudden, there’s no muck,” he said.
At one point, the crew observed a man using a grass-blower to blow leaves and grass from a yard along a canal into the lagoon. County officials frown on that behavior because it adds more nutrient-bearing plant material into the lagoon.
“That’s future muck,” Mayo said.
Savoia said she’ll next take the plotted muck-thickness points and prepare a map for the county.
And Walker Dawson, the county’s contract manager for the project, said Natural Resources will use the Muck Finders’ maps to plan where to send dredging contractors later to suck out the muck.
He said the county pays the Marine Resources Council about $5,200 for each of its muck-plotting missions. This was the third such mission.
The county has budgeted $200 million over the next 10 years, using the half-cent sales tax for lagoon cleanup, to find and remove muck.
Dawson said the Marine Resources Council doesn’t have to compete with other groups for its contracts because nobody else could do what the council can.
And that is getting a number of volunteers to become “citizen scientists” and help the professionals conduct the needed studies, Savoia said. The concept makes the lay citizens aware of the lagoon’s problems, involves them in solving the problems and encourages them to spread their new knowledge among their friends.
So the county treats the Marine Resources Council as a “sole source” vendor, Dawson said.
“We are absolutely satisfied with them,” he said. “The quality of their work is impressive, especially considering the money volunteers save. They provide a great work product, so the county is very happy.”
