Occoquan Watertrail League Readying for a Big 2011

Occoquan River enthusiasts, mark June 25 on your calendar. That’s the day the Occoquan Watertrail League (OWL) has chosen for its second River Conservation Day.

Turnout was much lower to last year’s event than league members and supporters had hoped, although it was very well received by those who did attend.

So this year, the league has decided to “piggyback” on the popular Occoquan River Festival, which will be held June 25 in the town of Occoquan.  The decision was made at last night’s OWL meeting at Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority headquarters in Fairfax Station.  A new name for the day will be chosen at a later date.  

The first conservation day was a learning experience for the league, a community-based group of paddlers and advocates of the Occoquan Water Trail. The league works with government agencies, landowners and volunteers to help provide long-term stewardship of the trail, which runs 40 miles from Bull Run to the Occoquan Bay just past Woodbridge.

The Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority’s liaison to OWL, John Houser, gave an overview of last year’s conservation day, telling the league what worked well and what needed improvement.

“It was a very successful event,” said Houser, who is the manager of Occoquan Regional Park. “It got lots of groups talking.”

But the day wasn’t promoted well and wasn’t well attended by the general public. Houser and others at the OWL meeting said a top priority this year is marketing.

“We are going to do a lot more promotion this year,” Houser said. The league also will make it easy for people to travel between the park and the town by using Rivershore Charters as a water taxi. Members also suggested having an interpreter or naturalist on each trip to talk about river conservation.

Linking conservation day to the festival presents new opportunities as well as new challenges according to Colin Riley of the Arlington Fairfax Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America. Riley said it was a chance to create a feeling of ownership with the general public, this is, after all, where their drinking water comes from.

The dilemma for OWL is how to attract visitors without compromising its mission.

Houser suggested forming an Occoquan Alliance of groups with the same goal that would meet twice a year. That idea got a boost from Anne O’Neill, an outdoor recreation planner with the National Park Service. She said alliances have formed around water trails in other parts of the country because a healthy water trail can improve the local economy. O’Neill said the Occoquan is a “hidden gem that a lot of people don’t know about.”

But others questioned whether such an alliance would be too large and how to get some groups to think “what’s in it for us” instead of “what’s in it for me.”

Houser said such an alliance could boost OWL’s efforts to secure a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails Network to make some of the improvements outlined in a recent assessment of the trail. Houser said OWL is going to seek a “fairly large” grant that must be matched dollar for dollar.

“Now that we have an assessment we have to go the next step, how do we make some of these things happen?” Zamon said.