n00b question - when offshore making a long passage

[Sterling]

what do you do with food scraps? toss them over? save them for a dump?

[ShadowRWolf]

if youre more than 3 miles off shore evreyting except plastic is tossed. the biggest thing is just make it sink. bottles with no tops and what not.
keeping trash on will smell very very fast. then you get magits and all other fun little bugs.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2225778_disp...rbage-sea.html
this may help one pof my books hase the full regs and im on my whay home now il re editt when i get in

[MidLandOne]

Originally Posted by ShadowRWolf

if youre more than 3 miles off shore evreyting except plastic is tossed

Not entirely correct for those of us in MARPOL signatory countries that have passed the requirements of MARPOL Annex V-Garbage into their own law then anything, including food, that goes over the side between 3 and 12 nm must be comminuted to less than 25mm in size. This, I suspect applies to most if not all of us (for those boats domiciled or registered in the USA by the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships I believe).

Nothing must be discharged within 3 nm, plastics cannot be discharged anywhere, and floating dunnage, linings and packing materials may be discharged if more than 25 nm from land.

There are also 8 regions where the rules are much stricter - those that are frequented a lot by sail boats are the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Wider Caribbean Region. In these places the disposal of any rubbish at all apart from food is prohibited and that must be more than 12 nm from land, except in the Caribbean Region it must be more than 3 nm from land.

In a number of countries (including the USA and New Zealand) vessels over a certain small size are required to carry notices along the above lines but also including oil, etc - that I am sure will be a surprise to many NZ'ers with pleasure vessels 12 meters or longer 'cos from what I've seen very few carry them .

While we are not into blue water cruising (it is much more comfortable to fly in our experience ) we do regularly cruise remote places for periods up to 4 weeks or so with no place to dump any rubbish at all. We have never found it any problem at all to hold all our rubbish (apart from scraps from fish we have caught) for such periods for a crew of two and I have no doubt we could do it for a crew of six. We bag all daily rubbish in smaller bags and when full place those in large trash bags which we lash to the shrouds.

[Ex-Calif]

Does anyone compact their trash or know of anyone who has a compactor installed?

[ssullivan]

Good thinking, Dan.

I also agree with Midlandone. Of course, I have agree since he is quoting proper procedures.

On our boat, which unfortunately only cruises USA coastal waters still, we haul all trash ashore.

[speciald@ocens.]

We have a compactor that runs off 110v. Must run genset to use it as it will not run the full cycle on the inverter. It is quite usefull off-shore for those pieces of plastic that can not be disposed of. It is also of use at anchor on in a marina as it saves trips to the disposal site. It does take a bit of galley space and would probably be impractical on smaller boats.