THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506170120
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastal Journal
SOURCE: Mary Reid Barrow
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
There is truly cause for celebrating at the Flyway Feast, Back Bay Restoration Foundation's annual fund-raiser Saturday.
This year the Back Bay Restoration folks are marking their 10th anniversary as custodians of the body of water that encompasses 39 square miles of southern Virginia Beach.
The feast, a celebration in its own right, also has 10 years of experience behind it. The barbecued hog and chicken, served up since day one, are tried and true highlights. Music will be by The Blues Exchange. The popular auction features many items, such as decoys, that represent the Back Bay tradition.
The anniversary festivities are from noon until 5 p.m. Saturday at the delightful old Flyway, a hunt club on Knotts Island on the shores of the North Landing River. Tickets are $25 a person or $40 a couple and include a year's membership in the foundation, a membership one would be proud to have. For more information, call Margaret Sacra, the foundation's executive director, at 546-9261.
So join the foundation, go to the feast and pass on congratulations for a decade-long job well done. No group is more deserving. The foundation has remained a steadfast concerned and caring parent to Back Bay and often the North Landing River for all those years.
The original group, led by Frank Thomas III of Norfolk, was mainly hunters and fishermen who had seen first hand how Back Bay water quality had declined in the 1970s. Once clear as a bell, the water was muddy. Underwater grasses that once fed enough ducks and geese for the area to be known as a hunter's paradise had just about disappeared. The bass, which drew fishermen from up and down the East Coast, were almost non-existent.
As time went on, the sportsmen were joined by conservationists, farmers and others. From less than 100 members, the group has grown to almost 1,000 folks who work to improve Back Bay in many ways, said Back Bay Restoration Foundation president Joy Eliassen.
Always concerned about what flows into the bay, they participate in all sorts of clean-up efforts, from Clean the Bay Day at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge to the adoption of a two-mile stretch of Princess Anne Road to clean several times a year. To prevent erosion, they plant grasses along canals and streams in areas that drain into Back Bay.
One popular education program for third- through sixth-graders that Eliassen often takes into the schools features a slide program on how lawn chemicals, pet waste and other pollutants can wash into the bay via the neighborhood storm drain. Then the children each receive miniature wooden decoys to paint and take home.
Among other efforts the foundation is sponsoring an exhibit on Back Bay water quality at the new Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Center which will open this summer at the deWitt Cottage on the Oceanfront. They have planted underwater grasses in certain areas of the bay and have seen the grasses increase and they have helped farmers install water control structures to prevent farm run-off from entering the bay.
For 10 straight years on the second Tuesday of the month, the foundation also has tested the salinity level of the bay water at six different sites.
This anniversary year, they will issue a report on their decade of data gathering, so the public can see the fluctuations and what external factors were involved, Eliassen noted.
``I feel excited,'' she said, ``especially because this has been 10 years of continuity with a locally based group. The energy of local citizens has kept us going.''
Let's raise a toast to another 10 years! ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARY REID BARROW
Joy Eliassen checks miniature decoys painted by art students at
Strawbridge Elementary School.
by CNB