by Patrick Reddy, Cincinatti.com
It’s not your typical yacht club.
A few hundred yards north of the Western Hills Viaduct, Mill Creek Yacht Club members Jeff Agricola and Larry Falkin – shovels in hand – stand in the knee-deep water of the Mill Creek and discuss the best way to extract a shopping cart, buried deep in the creek bottom. About 15 yards away, Steve Rodenberg sits on the gunwale of a canoe, beached on a 15-foot square spit of mud, picking up and sorting smaller bits of trash that have washed up onto the muddy bit of land.
Mill Creek Yacht Club, a branch of the Mill Creek Watershed Council, conducts several cleanups of the creek annually. Much of the work is done by yacht club members and volunteers working from canoes because of their shallow draft. Volunteers load everything from tires and shopping carts to electrical transformer housings into their canoes. Friday they put in on Mill Creek Road and traveled all the way to the barrier dam near the Eighth Street Viaduct.
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