"Well, there's really not much to tell, except that I just had the boat for like a month, and I never pumped out the holding tank before. It was getting dark, and I hooked it all up, but I had trouble screwing the fitting onto the pump out. It's a male fitting - and the pump out has a female fitting that you connect it to - you screw the male fitting into it, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't screwing in right. So I just forced it in there. And I started pumping out. I noticed that there wasn't much coming out, so I figured, it must be empty. I pumped it for a while - seemed like I had pumped it all out - waited for a while - seemed empty. So I undid it.
"My mom told me I should put bleach down the holding tank - keep it nice and fresh - so I poured a cup of bleach down after I was done, put the cap back on, went to bed. No problem. 'Cept when I woke up in the morning, I realized that I pumped out my fuel tank. I was going to work and I looked over there and said, my God, I just poured bleach down my fuel tank. That was the worst thing. I knew I didn't pump out any fuel, 'cause there's a hose that goes all the way to the bottom of the pump out tank, but the fuel tank doesn't have that.
"First of all, I thought about this filtering system in my tanks. The previous owner had conditioned the boat to go to the Bahamas. You never know, you might get bad fuel when you're away, so he rigged up this system called a fuel polisher that would clean the fuel after fill up to pull out any water or dirt that might contaminate the fuel, preventing it from going into your engine. So I turned on the fuel polisher, thinking I should just run it for a while. The tanks were pretty full with fuel. So I put the fuel polisher on, and I went to work.
"That was my other mistake.
"I was up on the hospital unit and I got a page from River City saying there was an oil slick behind my boat, and the City of Chicago had called them. The lady who I rented the slip from called me and said, you know, you have a fuel leak, you better get over here right now. I was thinking about the fuel polisher I turned on and I thought maybe something sprung a leak and was pumping all the fuel into the river and was siphoning out - I have a bilge pump, and if it filled up, it might be pumping out through the bilge. I panicked and raced to the boat.
"When I got there, first thing I did was go down to the engine room. But there was no fuel in the bilge. 'Course, the polisher was still running, so I shut that off...or did I shut that off? I didn't shut that off right away - I noticed there was fuel coming out of the side of the boat and I couldn't understand why. I got in my dinghy and paddled around the boat, trying to figure out where the leak was. My friend Doug told me, 'You gotta get out of the water - you can't look suspicous!'
"The fuel was foaming in the tank and was coming out of the breather, creating this oil slick. So I shut off the polisher and went out there and was wiping down the boat. It took a while to stop foaming. I had this bubbling system hooked up in front of the boat called the de-icer - I turned that on and pushed all the oil down away from my boat, down by Doug's boat. And then as I was getting everything cleaned up, I went inside, and I saw the Chicago Police boat coming toward me. I ducked down and hid, peeking out over the top of the door. It's a $10,000+ fine for dumping fuel in the water. Huge fine. They call conservation, it's a mess. Lawyer fees, all that stuff. Jail. Newspapers. Tribune photo.
"The police came up, they kept going. They didn't see anything."
Later that year, Mark received the Bonehead Award from the River Rats. It's a white plastic bone that fits over his head. He keeps it on the shelf beside a Cochina doll from Chinle, a certificate from completing the Birkebeiner, a photo from his first communion, a picture of his sweetheart, and his other most valued items.
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