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Old 01-27-2015, 10:44 PM   #9
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by markpierce View Post
What's wrong with ICW waters? Are they so terribly polluted? Even in the heavily-polluted 1960s SF Bay waters, we had no such problem.
It may have to do with something like tanin in the water. Boats that spend a lot of time in parts of the Inside Passage can develop this "brown bow wave," too, although I don't know how it compares to the boats on the ICW.

But I believe the cause up the Passage is the high concentrations of tanin from the trees. It's why some lakes along the coast appear almost black from the air. When you land on them, you see that the water is like dark tea. It's not pollution, at least not in the man-made sense. It's the tanin from the surrounding trees that have been dropping needles and sometimes themselves into the water for eons.

Perhaps the mud in the ICW contains a dye-like content that, when stirred up by the passage of boats, creates the moustache on the bows.
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