LOWELL -- Giant heaps of rusty, corroded and once water-logged debris dried out in the morning sun alongside the Merrimack River's edge near UMass Lowell's Bellegarde Boathouse.

You name it, chances are they pulled it out. Among the piles of rubbish: a rear-quarter of a pickup truck, two kitchen sinks, a hot-water tank, a manure spreader and more than 180 old tires. But this year's favorite find is a rusted-over anchor about 3 feet tall. It's the grandest treasure to be retrieved from the river from the Clean Water Project's annual cleanup. It likely fell off a big boat that used to run up and down the river, said Rocky Morrison, executive director of the Clean River Project, as he admired the anchor, imagining the story it might have to tell.

Every year the Clean River Project cleans up the 16-mile stretch along the Merrimack River from the falls in Lowell to the falls in Lawrence, flowing through Methuen, Dracut, Andover and Tyngsboro.

This year's event, held from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, drew about 70 volunteers, who worked through the pouring rain to trawl and haul tons of trash from the river.

"You want some wicker furniture?" quipped Morrison's brother, Roscoe, while rooting through a rusted mound of debris. "And look at this. We've got a vintage toaster. You should go to Antique Roadshow with that."

Passers-by slowed and gawked at the heaps of river refuse yesterday morning. Some took cell-phone photos. "It's ridiculous," said Christian Hill resident Freida Sampson, who was walking by the river with her boyfriend, Ray Smith. "I can't believe people throw that much crap in the river. We have little kids swimming the beach area, a footballlength away."

Rocky Morrison, of Salem, N.H., said the nonprofit Clean River Project has been cleaning the Merrimack for the past five years, and that hasn't been an easy feat without state or federal funding.

He's tried to gain the support from state legislators, to no avail. "I was raised on the river, and I got to the point that there was so much trash, that when you'd go boating, you didn't know what was coming at you every 15 feet," he said. "You would come across kids' toys, car parts, tires and trash. You just didn't know what you'd see next."

He started to handpick those pieces of refuse out of the water, but then got more serious about the effort. He started drumming up volunteers and holding fundraisers. He's even rigged up a fleet of his own 30-foot pontoon boats, outfitted with special hoists that allow him to pull up items weighing a thousand pounds out of the water. And despite the fact the project is his passion, it gets harder to do it without funding every year.

A fundraiser Saturday only reaped $116, while the one-day cleanup alone costs about $12,000, he said. "We're actually in the red right now," Rocky Morrison said. "We're going on pennies right now. And we really need help."

It's a sobering thought to realize as well that the river also provides the drinking water for more than 30,000 residents of Lowell, Methuen, Lawrence and other surrounding towns, he said. "It goes to show how much debris is in the Lowell waterways," he said.

Billerica resident Paul Roper stared in amazement at all the junk dredged out of the river, "it really makes you wonder what else is out there," he said. For more information on the Clean River Project or on how to help, log on to www.cleanriverproject.org.

(c) 2010 The Sun (Lowell, MA). All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.