CASCADE - Matthew Lisk inched belly down and head first onto a submerged log in pursuit of a Styrofoam bowl.

He succeeded. And besides the bowl that once held an angler's worms, Lisk came back with a couple of plastic bottles and a six-foot piece of lumber. Along with the trash, the wood was taken back to the shore of Owasco Inlet, which feeds 55 to 75 percent of Owasco's Lake water.

Even though the wood he scooped out of a snag in the inlet was technically biodegradable, "it's not exactly like the beaver made it," said Lisk, a Southern Cayuga High School student.

Making the inlet cleaner was the goal Friday for Lisk and his eight BOCES New Visions environmental program classmates.

Paddling the inlet in six kayaks and two canoes donated by South Side Marina owner Jack Wellauer, the BOCES students spent the morning with their instructor, Ann Moore, scooping out decades-old Pepsi cans, dozens of plastic bottles, beer cans and the biggest scorn of all: non-biodegradable Styrofoam worm containers dropped at the same fishing spots anglers will likely return to.

"It's pretty unintelligent to be polluting what you'll be using," said Matthew Vitale, a Port Byron student who paddled his own kayak, which he typically uses at his family's camp on Cayuga Lake.

Auburn High School student Vanessa Gibson - who turned 18 on Friday - passed a woman who asked if the fallen trees couldn't be taken down, but Gibson told her it was important habitat for animals.

On a more promising note, Gibson said, another person asked her

for a garbage bag to pick up trash near their fishing spot.

With the pike fishing season opening today, the inlet was unusually active, Moore said. Often a kayaker can paddle the inlet in isolation except for the occasional murmur of traffic on nearby Route 38.

The wind blew northeast as the group paddled southbound past spring violets, May apples and skunk cabbage. Broad swathes of blue sky were visible through green-veined red-maple leaves.

Auburn High School student Irene Holak spotted a beaver close to the mouth of the Owasco Inlet in Cascade, which leads into a four-mile corridor running up to Moravia that's well-traveled by birders. The streambanks - healthy with thick vegetation holding them back from erosion - were broken up by several beaver slides.

The New Visions yearlong class has not only taken its participating students kayaking into the inlet to collect trash remnants, but it will gain them nine college credits in English, biology and geospatial technology, as well as high school credits.

For some of them, it has also shown what they hope to do for the rest of their lives.

The three-credit Cayuga Community College geographic information systems component of the class showed Vitale that he wants to major in geographic information systems at SUNY Cortland.

Lisk - with a black cowboy hat cocked on his head and jean jacket pulled over a wolf T-shirt - said New Visions helped him find out he wants to become an environmental historian.

He did a project for his New Visions class in which he studied the change in Japanese attitude toward the now-extinct Japanese wolf.

Lisk sent his application Friday to his dream college - Vermont's Sterling College - where he would be able to study ecology management that incorporates a historical perspective.

In the more immediate future, before the class made up of seniors scatters to their respective college plans, they head next week to the Adirondacks' Lake Oswegatchie, where they will complete a leadership ropes course and the geographic-information mapping of a hiking trial, Moore said.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 x282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net