Scoutmaster Dave Rutty said the troop has been working with the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) on the cleanup for three or four years now. It's a great project for the scouts because it involves helping the community and giving back to the environment, he said.
They collected a couple of old tires, a beat up traffic cone, muddy chunks of Styrofoam, a few discarded lawn chairs, and several black trash bags of debris. It all filled up a trailer with trash to be hauled away to an MDC dumpster.
And they had fun doing it too. Scouts Jimmy Turcotte, 14, Alex Kojko, 14, Sam Cook, 11, and John-Michael Milne, 12, were calling themselves "The Muddy Boys" after the cleanup was done. Their messy exploits included Cook losing his shoes in the mud (he managed to get them back again) and Kojko getting stuck twice, the second time having to be dug out by one of the adults.
Rich Doran and Jim Woodworth were also on hand, independent of the scouts. They're both from the Great Meadows Conservation Trust, a local group dedicated to land preservation in Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, and Glastonbury.
Doran said they mostly collected drink containers and food wrappers, discarded by the boaters and picnickers who frequent the cove. "Some people haven't gotten the message of 'carry in, carry out,'" he said.
For more information about the annual cleanup, visit the Connecticut River Watershed Council's Web site at www.ctriver.org.