The Green Armada: Four cousins are cleaning up the Florida coastline in the hope others will get the hint.

By Anita Bartholomew(photo: Amy Guip) On the fishing pier alongside Tampa Bay’s stunning, golden Sunshine Skyway Bridge, pelicans, sea gulls and egrets hover close to the people dangling their fishing lines in the water, hoping somebody will toss a mouthful their way. Near the north end of the bridge’s five-and-ahalf- mile span, Mark Maksimowicz and his sister, Janice Whitmore, “fish” for what earlier visitors have tossed: fast-food wrappers, broken toys, dirty diapers and other debris. Janice, outfitted in knee-high steel-toed rubber boots, uses giant tongs to snag a beer bottle. A Budweiser can in a swampy pool is out of reach. “I’ll let Mark get that one,” she says, then steps deeper into the muck and manages to grab it. Into a big trash bag it goes, with the rest of the day’s catch. Mark and Janice, along with their cousins Jeff and Vince Albanese, are the founding members of the Green Armada. All in their 40s, they’ve made it their personal mission to clean up the coastlines around Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, Florida. On a typical outing, Mark estimates, they haul between 400 and 700 pounds of trash to the dump. Where they go on any given day depends on the weather. “If the wind is blowing from the east, we know that St. Pete is going to get hit with a lot of trash,” says Mark. And if the wind blows from the west? “We’re over on the Tampa side.” None of them gets paid to do what they do. Yet for Mark Maksimowicz, the Green Armada is the fulfillment of a dream he’s had for more than ten years. He held a lucrative position as director of operations for the Florida International Museum until 1997. Dismayed by the debris he saw everywhere along the once-pristine coastlines he’d fished and boated all his life, he discovered that no government agency was designated to clean it up. City trucks picked up garbage outside homes and businesses, but their job stopped there. Mark quit his job, used a chunk of his savings to buy a barge and started pulling trash from the waterways. It immediately felt overwhelming, but he hoped his efforts would inspire others to pitch in. Then a family crisis struck. In 2000 daughter Mia was born with spina bifida, and Mark’s marriage broke up under the strain. He became a single father and ran through much of his savings paying for Mia’s treatment. Time to go back to work. He started a business making custom parts for Harley- Davidson motorcycles. His coastal cleanup dream would have to wait. A couple of years later, Mark and his cousins were sitting at a dockside restaurant, reminiscing about their favorite childhood fishing spots. “I remember when Tampa Bay was a different color,” says Mark. Salt Creek’s shoreline was now littered with broken glass. The three men decided to do together what Mark had once tried to do alone: kick-start a movement to clean up the Tampa Bay area coastline. They knew they’d need a boat, so they named their effort the Green Armada. They didn’t quite know what they were getting into. “We thought we could get a boat in the water for less than $20,000,” says Vince. But a standard craft couldn’t haul more than a ton of trash or sail into the tight, shallow spaces where debris collects. So Mark custom-designed their boat around a flat-bottom shell, placing the controls at the front instead of the back to make it easier to navigate into coastal pockets and inlets. There were other expenses they hadn’t considered: legal fees, insurance, safety equipment. So far, the cousins have spent about $100,000 of their own savings to launch the Green Armada. Jeff quit his job as a health care systems analyst to devote himself to the effort fulltime. So did Janice, who worked in dental administration. Under the hot Florida sun, it’s grueling and sometimes dangerous work. On any given day, they might come across human waste, hypodermic needles, dead rats. “It’s not for the weak-hearted,” says Mark. And the dangers aren’t limited to what they pick up. “Stingrays are a problem,” Janice adds. What’s the worst of it? “Condoms come through the sewer lines,” says Mark. Even seemingly innocuous trash carries dangers for wildlife. “The worst things are the plastic bags for the dolphins and manatees,” he explains. “They think they’re jellyfish, they suck them up and they die.” Contamination from bacteria closed nearly one-third of the nation’s beaches last year. In April the Green Armada got its official nonprofit status. To stay afloat and keep its founders out of bankruptcy, they’ve learned to ask for help. The mayor of St. Petersburg lets them dump the trash for free at a municipal site. The local Wal-Mart donates garbage bags and is planning a beach-cleanup day for employees. A scrap-metal recycler, Trademark Metals Recycling, has promised to donate all the metal for framing new boats. The Green Armada hopes to have a fleet of the vessels, “as ugly as they are, all over the state, picking up trash,” Mark says. If they attract sponsors the way they’ve been attracting volunteers (700 have signed up so far), he may get his wish. Recently, they were back at Salt Creek. “What kills you is, we clean it to where you wouldn’t mind sitting there, reading a book,” says Mark, “and a week later, it’s like we never came out there.” But they come back anyway, hoping someday they’ll reach their long-term goal: that so many others will be inspired to clean up the waterways—and more important, stop and think before carelessly tossing anything away—there will be no need for a Green Armada.