1 boat and 400 miles shoreline: How Baykeeper's fighting to keep San Francisco Bay clean

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- Sejal Choksi-Chugh doesn't need a hand getting on the boat that's waiting for her.

She climbs on easily with her bag as she has done hundreds of times before.

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After greeting the skipper, Robert Fairbank, she asks him if they have enough gas.

Choksi-Chugh isn't going out on a pleasure cruise, she is a lawyer, and the nonprofit she leads - Baykeeper -- owns the boat, and is one of the very few - if not the only one -- that patrols over 400-miles of Bay Area shoreline working to keep industrial polluters from violating the Clean Water Act.

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Four others clamor aboard for the shoreline inspection.

The small boat pulls out from the public pier in Oakland just beyond Lungomare restaurant and heads towards and past Brooklyn Basin.

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For the next three hours two donors, one board member, a legal intern and a journalist travel across the Bay between Oakland and San Francisco as Choksi-Chugh points to sites Baykeeper has sued for violating the Clean Water Act, and there are many.

From cement to metal recycling plants there are many different kinds of chemicals produced by each plant's activities that can seep into the Bay and before the Clean Water Act was passed, it didn't so much as seep as flow.

Until Baykeeper came along.

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