On a summer day in Jamestown, three teenagers struck out on an ambitious journey: to swim from Jamestown to Newport.
They didn’t plan. They didn’t think about the tides.
One friend rowed a boat while the other two swam. The two swimmers made one promise to each other before they set out: no matter how tired they became, they would not touch the boat.
The two-mile crossing took hours, far longer than they expected after failing to account for the currents. Eventually, exhausted, they reached the rocky shore at Newport's Ida Lewis Yacht Club.
Trudy Coxe, now in her seventies, was one of those three teens. She would go on to become the executive director at the nonprofit Save The Bay, and start an event called “The Swim,” inspired by her intrepid childhood.
This Saturday, some 330 people will swim that same stretch for the 50th time since 1977. Over the past five decades, The Swim has raised about $7 million for the organization’s advocacy. But its legacy stretches beyond fundraising. The event has become a symbol for one of the state’s biggest environmental success stories: the transformation of Narragansett Bay.
Courtesy Save the Bay
A bay in need of saving
In the 1970s, many parts of Narragansett Bay, especially upper Narragansett Bay, were not safe to swim in or fish in.
Factories lining rivers that fed the bay discharged toxic industrial waste, including heavy metals and dyes. Some rivers reportedly changed color depending on what nearby industries were producing that day.
Providence's wastewater treatment plant had largely stopped functioning, sending nearly 65 million gallons of untreated or partially treated sewage into Rhode Island waters daily, according to the Narragansett Bay Commission. Human waste regularly washed up along Warwick and Barrington’s shorelines, said Topher Hamblett, current Save the Bay executive director, who grew up in Barrington.
Many in the state, Trudy Coxe remembers, had accepted the status quo.
“There was an economic study that was done by the University of Rhode Island at the same period of time saying…that Narragansett Bay's best economic use was as a sewer,” said Coxe. “So in those days, it didn't seem unreasonable to just use it as a dumping ground.”
As a young environmentalist volunteering at Save the Bay, Coxe hoped to change that attitude. The organization was formed in 1970 following a successful campaign against the construction of an oil refinery in Tiverton.
Coxe created the organization’s newsletter and did advocacy work. One of her jobs was to visit schools dressed as a papier-mache sea creature called the “Bay Bottom Blotch.” As The Blotch, she would bemoan the pollution affecting Narragansett Bay and teach kids that it was possible to clean it up.
But she had another idea to spread awareness: a swim, modeled on the one she did as a teen.
"We wanted to get people into the water," she said. "If people are willing to swim across the bay, then maybe they'll start asking why it isn't cleaner."
John Scanlon, the organization’s first executive director, wasn’t easily convinced, Coxe remembers. But Coxe was determined, and he ultimately relented.
Over the next few months, Coxe worked with the Coast Guard and a number of organizations to make sure that swimmers would be safe, and that shipping lanes wouldn’t endanger swimmers. She recruited people in row boats to accompany swimmers across the bay.
But her planning could only go so far. The week of the event, the state Department of Health notified her that the water quality at the shore starting point for the swim, a beach in downtown Jamestown, was dangerously poor.
“We got a notice from the Department of Health saying, ‘Are you sure that the start of the swim is in unswimmable, unfishable waters?’” Coxe remembers.
It was a fitting challenge for an anti-pollution event.
Coxe commandeered a number of rowboats to bring swimmers out to open water, past the line of pollution, so their day could continue. On the day of the swim, about 100 people successfully made it across the bay.
“It couldn't have been a better marketing ploy,” Coxe remembers. “They did it. And it was very much fun. It got national press. It was unbelievable.”
Over the next few years, Coxe continued to run the swim. And Save The Bay’s message began to gain traction.
“I think the swim really helped creatively bring the bay into focus more clearly for people,” said Coxe. “The swim sort of catalyzed people's understanding about the value of Narragansett Bay, that it wasn't just a shipping line.”
Cleaning up the Bay
In the years following the swim, Save the Bay shifted its focus to the city of Providence’s failing wastewater treatment plant.
They advocated for the creation of the Narragansett Bay Commission, which assumed responsibility for operating and improving the treatment plant.
Then, in the eighties, the organization successfully advocated for an $87 million clean water bond to upgrade the facility.
That decade, the organization also began publishing an annual report called “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” grading wastewater treatment plants throughout the 1,700-square-mile Narragansett Bay watershed, which stretches into Massachusetts.
The list held treatment plants accountable to existing government standards, prompting them to invest in better systems, Hamblett said.
“It had this way of creating a lot of competition within the wastewater treatment industry to get on the ‘good’ list and get off of the ‘ugly’ list,” Hamblett said.
Then, in the nineties, the group successfully advocated for the Narragansett Bay Commission to construct massive underground storage tunnels to hold sewer overflows. Storm drains in some cities flowed into the same pipes as sewage, so heavy rains would overwhelm sewage treatment plants, forcing them to dump raw sewage and stormwater into the bay.
Underground storage tunnels were designed to temporarily store the surplus of wastewater until treatment plants could process it. To date, a tunnel and pipe system have been built, and another tunnel is currently under construction.
The first tunnel to be built, which was completed in 2008, had prevented 17.8 billion gallons of wastewater and stormwater from entering the bay as of January 2026, according to the Narragansett Bay Commission.
Save The Bay also pushed regulators to tighten limits on the nitrogen and phosphorus discharged by treatment plants. Excess nutrients fuel algae blooms that consume oxygen and create "dead zones" harmful to marine life.
Today, nearly every wastewater treatment plant in the watershed must follow those tighter limits, Hamblett said.
The efforts paid off. Between 2000 and 2015, nitrogen and phosphorous pollution from wastewater treatment facilities has approximately halved, according to the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program.
And in 2021, upper parts of Narragansett Bay were deemed clean enough for shellfishing for the first time in more than 70 years.
Topher Hamblett says the progress can be seen firsthand.
“People are fishing in the Providence River. People can see and catch striped bass downtown, which is amazing,” said Hamblett. “The city of East Providence is planning to open up swimming beaches at Crescent Park and Sabin Point in the next few years. So the proof is in the pudding.”
The future of the bay
With so much progress made, Topher Hamblett and Save the Bay are now focused on a new threat: complacency.
His main concern is the maintenance and replacement of aging infrastructure. In Providence and Newport, sewage pipes can be more than a century old and made of brick, or even wood, Hamblett said.
And newer facilities can have problems too. He points to two sewer main failures this spring–one in Bristol and another in East Providence. The latter dumped 800,000 gallons of sewage into the Providence River, just upstream of key shellfishing beds.
Those incidents, Hamblett said, underscore the need for wastewater utilities to invest in maintenance before failures occur.
“We need to protect the progress that we've made,” Hamblett said.
This year’s Save The Bay swim will take place on Saturday, Aug. 8. Swimmers will begin leaving from Newport Naval Base at 8:45 a.m. and finish the 2-mile swim at Potter Cove in Jamestown. Though registration for swimming at this year’s event is full, organizers say spectators are welcome at the finish line in Jamestown.
As for Coxe, she’s looking forward to watching the swimmers make their journey this Saturday.
“I’m thrilled,” she said. “I really am happy that it has survived. And I suspect it’s going to continue for another 50 years.”
