THE STORY OF THE CLEANUP
It started with a boat.
In 2012, three friends borrowed an electric boat built for harbor cruising and drove it 353 nautical miles down the coast, Santa Barbara to Ensenada, towing a fine-mesh net to see what was really in the water. The open ocean was cleaner than anyone expected. The harbors were not.
What they worked out next is the reason this event exists. The trash in Newport Harbor is not Newport’s. It washes down off the whole inland watershed: through gutters, storm drains and flood channels, into the bay, on its way to the ocean. The harbor is simply where it becomes visible. It is also where it can be stopped.
Fourteen years later, that finding has become a monthly cleanup program copied into other harbors, a $5.5 million trash interceptor running at the mouth of San Diego Creek, and the largest underwater cleanup in Newport Harbor, the one this site invites you to join.
This page is that story, told mostly in their own words.
The expedition
Mark Ward and Billy Dutton had an idea for driving an electric harbor boat to Mexico, and Marshall Duffield, founder of Duffy Electric Boat Company and later Mayor of Newport Beach, gave them one out of his own yard to do it in. A standard Duffy carries eight batteries; theirs carried forty-eight. They launched from Santa Barbara on October 7, 2012 and ran 353 nautical miles in 14 days, towing a fine-mesh net, plugging in at a different port every night, hosted mostly by yacht clubs whose dinners became talks about ocean plastic. Eric Pike drove ground support the whole way in Billy’s 1959 Volkswagen bus. At the Santa Barbara kickoff, a friend of a friend brought a marine biologist named Melinda Williams; she has been part of this work from the first night.
The expedition was supposed to be about the open ocean. It became about the harbors before it was over, at the start of each morning:
“We would be late leaving every morning because there was trash in the harbor. We couldn’t leave it behind. We had skimmer baskets with us, and we would be running around the docks and picking up all this trash.”
Mark Ward, co-founder
The coast was fine. The harbors were not.
“But all of the harbors were a mess. And that’s when we said, you know, they have beach cleanups on the first Saturday? They should have harbor cleanups. And that’s when the three of us were standing on the dock, said, okay, we’re going to start a harbor cleanup, and we’ll start the first one right here in Newport Harbor.”
Billy Dutton, co-founder
They called it Help Your Harbor. Duffy backed it. Two local outfits, Southwind Kayak and the Newport Aquatic Center, lent kayaks free, every time. It ran on the first Saturday of every month, for eight years, and it grew the way real things grow: five people, ten people, 25, 50, 80, 100.
Billy did something most volunteer cleanups never do: he weighed the bags.
“As I’m looking into each bag and then weighing them. And then that was when, after a few months of that, I went to my first Tidelands and Water Committee meeting at the city of Newport Beach to share this information.”
Billy Dutton, co-founder
The city’s first response had been: what trash? what problem? The data answered it, and put numbers behind the finding from the expedition: this is the watershed’s trash, and the harbor is where it can be caught.
Create a model and hand it off
Billy’s data took him onto the executive committee of Surfrider’s Newport chapter, and then to a West Coast all-chapter convention in Ventura, drawing California, Oregon and Hawaii, where he presented the harbor gap to every chapter in the room. Huntington Beach took it on.
“And we started that Help Your Harbor. And it’s still going today in Huntington Beach, in Huntington Harbor.”
Billy Dutton, co-founder
That was the goal from the start, in Eric’s words:
“Create a model and hand it off.”
Eric Pike, co-founder
The waterwheel
Billy had heard about a machine in Baltimore’s harbor: a floating pontoon that funnels everything on the water onto a conveyor turned by a waterwheel. He asked its inventor, John Kellett of Clearwater Mills, whether it would work in Newport. Kellett flew out to look. Duffy brought in engineer Pat Fuscoe, who worked the proposal pro bono. The target: the mouth of San Diego Creek, where the whole watershed’s trash enters Upper Newport Bay.
An expensive idea from a volunteer group needed credibility. Eric knew someone at Patagonia, so he and Billy drove to Ventura, and came back with a grant, written to the City of Newport Beach.
“Now you’ve got a big corporation like Patagonia saying, hey, guys, we’ll help you.”
Billy Dutton, co-founder
The money was never the point. Patagonia’s backing was the credibility that opened the room. In the room were California Fish and Game, State Parks, the City, the Irvine Company, the Newport Bay Conservancy, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Coastal Commission. It took six years, and there were objections, studies, and stretches when the project looked dead.
It cleared at a state Ocean Protection Council meeting in Santa Cruz in October 2018. Nothing else awarded that day reached $100,000. The waterwheel got $1.68 million.
The Newport Bay Trash Interceptor is real. A $1.68 million state grant under Proposition 1, a $5.5 million total project, built by the City of Newport Beach and unveiled in March 2025. It is the first trash-collecting water wheel on the US West Coast, designed to capture up to 240 tons of trash a year at San Diego Creek before it reaches the bay. The Ocean Protection Council’s own funding table lists Help Your Harbor by name.
None of the founders will take credit for it, and they are right not to: it took a city, a state agency, an engineer working pro bono, and a corporation willing to put its name on a volunteer group’s idea.
Underwater
The underwater cleanup came home from Catalina. Mark Ward and Melinda Williams went out to the island, where an underwater cleanup had been running for decades, and worked with its founders to learn how the thing was actually run. Catalina pointed them to Dana Point, and the harbormaster there handed them the playbook.
The timing came from the other direction. In a car on the way to a water district meeting during the waterwheel campaign, city staff asked Billy directly:
“It was like, all right, do you have the capacity to get an underwater cleanup going in Newport Harbor?”
Billy Dutton, co-founder
The first one ran in 2017 at the Balboa Bay Club, which didn’t flinch: food, lawn, valets moving dive gear. Duffy’s rental yard, a hundred yards away, lent boats to scatter divers across the harbor. A dozen marine conservation organizations exhibited, and while the divers were down, Billy ran a roundtable so those groups could trade needs and contacts.
Three sold-out years: 2017, 2018, 2019. Then the pandemic took the 2020 event, and the founders deliberately let it rest so local businesses could recover. In 2023 the city came asking.
“The city asked us to bring it back… a city like Newport Beach say, hey guys, can we do this again?”
Eric Pike, co-founder
It returned in 2024 at Marina Park, the city’s own choice of venue, with about 60 divers and 125 shore volunteers, professional crews working the trash-transfer boat, and CR&R on the dumpster. This September’s cleanup is the sixth.
What one Saturday does now: 25.2 miles of coastline, bay and harbor waterways. More than 300 divers and above-water volunteers. Roughly 5,000 pounds of trash and single-use plastics off the bottom of the harbor at the last cleanup alone.
It is not light work. The heaviest job in the harbor is the suction dredge:
“A diver that’s hanging onto a six-inch nozzle, and it’s like holding an 85-pound dumbbell and crab walking along the bottom with it for three hours.”
A commercial diver who works the harbor
What comes up is not litter. It is bricks, windows out of Duffy boats, and boat covers.
The people
A dream started by three or four people, carried by a lot more.
Mark Ward, co-founder
Billy Dutton, co-founder
Eric Pike, co-founder
Melinda Williams, marine biologist and a founder of Help Your Harbor, part of this work since the first night of the 2012 expedition
Marshall Duffield, Duffy Electric Boat Company: the boat that started it, and backing ever since
The City of Newport Beach, partner on every cleanup, and the interceptor’s owner and operator
SunPower, the first sponsor of all: solar panels on the expedition boat
Patagonia, the early grant that gave a volunteer group’s idea corporate credibility
The full roll of sponsors and partners, 2012 to today, is on the sponsors page.
What’s next
The interceptor collects trash. It doesn’t stop trash. What stops it is people who never let it reach the water. That is where this goes next.
It’s trash that’s being collected that’s not going out into the ocean, but it’s going to the landfill… That’s the next step. That’s the next phase… that’s the next evolution of the mission statement.
Eric Pike, co-founder
We don’t have to talk about it. We can show them.
Eric Pike, co-founder
Part of showing it is Riding Currents, the documentary now in production about how all of this happened, told by the people who did it, shot on the water where it happened.
The ask
The cleanup runs on sponsors, from the first Patagonia grant that opened a room at City Hall to the boats, dumpsters, and dive gear that make one Saturday in September work.
Sponsors. The 2026 ask, and everyone who has given since 2012, is on the sponsors page.
Volunteers. The sixth Newport Harbor Underwater Cleanup is Saturday, September 26, 2026, at Marina Park. Divers in the water at 7am. Sign up on the volunteer page.
Donations to the cleanup are received by Task Force Pacific, the 501(c)(3) under which the cleanup operates.
You should care about our planet and our oceans. It just seems like the way to live your life.
Mark Ward, co-founder