The owner of a local towboat company says he's seen some foul smelling, brown matter in Windsor's waterways and he is telling his crew not to touch it.

"We started seeing floating debris, some in Windsor, a lot in [the] LaSalle area, down current," said Glenn Swinton. "It looked to be floating excrement. Some raised a bit of an alarm. As we started travelling through it we noticed it was breaking up and entering the water."

Swinton owns Canadian Coastal Services of Amherstburg, a company that tows stranded boats back to shore. His crew is out on the water every day boating through the brown, floating "stuff."

"It had a really definite shape and I'm not going to say texture, because nobody was touching it," said Swinton. "When the guys pull the boats into the marina and the marina is full of debris, the boats get close, the rope gets slack, as they're pulling the ropes through the water this debris is all in the rope."

Lab testing for E. coli

Swinton has been documenting how often the matter showed up in the water, and said it has been there all summer. When he realized it wasn't going away, he contacted CBC Windsor to help figure out what it is.

Even if the videos and pictures taken of the brown matter seemed to show it was feces, CBC Windsor reporter Lisa Xing took a sample to be tested scientifically.

Rajesh Seth, who works at Windsor University's engineering department, and specializes in waste water testing, wasn't afraid to roll up his sleeves.

He collected water samples from the Lakeview Marina, to test them for E. coli. Seth said if it was some kind of dirt, it would have broken up in the water.

The testing process involves collecting at least one sample of the material and one sample of clear water, to use as measure. Back at the university lab Seth diluted the samples with water, incubated the them for 24 hours and waited to see if they had a reaction.

He said when you shine a light on the samples at about body temperature, the samples with E. coli glow under a UV light.

Results show low E. coli numbers

The results came back inconclusive. Seth said it showed numbers that did indicate E. coli was present in the samples, but not in startling amounts.

Seth said the fact that the matter had been in the water for some time could influence the results, because when E.coli is left out in the environment, the bacteria tends to die very quickly.

"Because E. coli can degrade over time quickly in the environment, this material ... if it had been sitting there for a long time, it's quite possible the numbers have declined and that's why we haven't been able to see the elevated numbers," he explained. "It's definitely organic. It definitely does not look like something that would come in your storm flows."

He also mentioned that it's not likely something that came from the storm sewers, so it's not algae or anything normally found in the water.

Swinton still worried about people in water

Seth said he's still suspicious, because if the samples are skewed, there could be a large amount of excrement in the water. To determine if it is in fact feces, he would have to test the material when it's fresh.

Meanwhile, Swinton remains concerned for anyone that may go into the water.

"For common Sea-Dooers, they're jumping off their machines into the marina not realizing what they're actually standing in," he said "If it's dirt, fine, wash it out, but if it's something else, we don't want to be playing in that.

"I work and play on the water. I spend every day, all summer long, on the water and that's the last thing I want to see.

CBC Windsor along with Swinton and Seth will continue to monitor the situation and try to determine what the brown material really is.