By Tara Fischer

Staff Writer

The community’s marine activities advisory committee finds that Ocean Pines’ water quality is “excellent” per preliminary testing.

On Saturday, Nov. 23, at the Ocean Pines Association’s Board of Directors meeting, OPA Marine Activities Advisory Committee member Sue Challis and Assateague Coastal Trust Coastkeeper Taylor Swanson updated neighborhood residents on a six-week water quality testing initiative that took place from the end of last summer into the fall.

The marine committee purchased testing kits to evaluate the nutrients in five Ocean Pines waterway spots: the White Horse Park boat ramp, the upper end of Manklin Creek, where it is the shallowest, a residential canal close to the Ocean Pines golf course, the Ocean Pines Yacht Club, and the Bainbridge Park Pond.

“At each of these sites with the test kits, we are testing for various parameters,” Swanson said. “This includes dissolved oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, pH, temperature, and turbidity. Each of these gives us a different piece of the puzzle for what we look at in the water and what kind of inputs we’re seeing.”

Particularly, the coastkeeper said they are interested in the impacts of nitrogen and phosphorus coming into the water and where they see the biggest quantity. In moderate amounts, these nutrients support algae and aquatic plant growth, providing food for marine life. In excess amounts, the nutrients can become harmful to water quality. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle. Significant increases in algae harm water quality, food resources, and habitats, and decrease the oxygen that fish and other aquatic life need to survive.”

“We are going to use that data to try and identify the biggest sources of nitrogen and phosphorus coming into Ocean Pines,” Swanson added. “Everything that comes into Ocean Pines eventually ends up in your coastal bays, so your ability as a community to address what is happening in your canals has a profound impact on what is happening on the coastal bays at large.”

The project will resume at the beginning of April. Challis hopes that when it picks back up again, the group will be able to provide a better, more comprehensive picture of Ocean Pines’ water quality. Currently, the data is limited to the six summer-fall weeks when the water was warmer. In the spring, the water will differ from what was initially recorded. For instance, “the algae blooms will probably be really present,” the marine committee member said.

Challis added that throughout the early testing, regarding pH rating, they have been getting “sevens across the board,” which is a classification of “excellent.” Seven indicates that the water is neutral. EPA recommends that drinking water sits at a pH range of 6.5 to 8.5. The group has also found high levels of dissolved oxygen, essential for healthy and stable waterways. However, the committee member notes that while these are good signs, the data findings are early, and additional and continuous testing will reveal more long-term and accurate trends.

“This project began at the end of summer, the beginning of fall months where we do see a sharp decline in nitrogen and phosphorus coming into the waterway,” Swanson said. “This project will resume at the beginning of April. We hope to see the spring rains that start in April and the warming of temperatures that bring a lot of excess nutrients into the waterway. We will have data that we will be eager to show next year. It is important this program continues for some time so we can start to see trends throughout the years because you can never know when you’re going to have certain spikes because of an anomaly. We don’t want to be presenting data that is not statistically significant.”

The Assateague Coastal Trust has a water quality test of its own. The organization focuses on prevalent bacteria in Assawoman and the Isle of Wight Bay.

“We take an angle of trying to look at the most popular fishing and swimming spots across the bay to make sure people are safe,” the coastkeeper said. “We post our data online every Friday from Memorial Day through Labor Day.”

More data will be revealed once the Ocean Pines program resumes in 2025. Swanson hopes the compiled data will improve the quality of the Ocean Pines waters.

“First, we need to understand what is in the water in the first place,” he said. “What are the inputs coming into the water? And then we can work on campaigns and solutions that take what you do as a board of directors, what we do with the marine advisory committee, and we can pass that on to citizens to show them how their impact on the land, what they do in the landscape influences the quality of the water. We can have clean water, beautiful water that you can fish in and swim in right here in the canals. You already have wonderful water, but it could be better.”