This morning, rather than the driving along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island to scan for whales and other marine mammals, my friend and I decided to volunteer on one of the monthly beach cleans organised by the Vancouver Island Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. Every month the chapter holds a beach clean at one of the beaches along the Vancouver Island coast and today we were helping collect garbage around China Beach Provincial Park, on the west coast of southern Vancouver Island, about a two hour drive from Victoria.
The event was well organised and fun and even included snacks! Everybody who volunteered for this month's beach clean met at the China Beach Park parking lot where Surfrider coordinators distributed gloves and re-usable bags for us (I was impressed they kept the plastic bag use to a minimum!) to use for collecting the garbage. Once we had our gloves on and bags in hand we headed down the beach and the roughly 40-50 of us spread out in all directions to pick up as much garbage we could find.
Interestingly, individually it didn't feel like there was much garbage to collect, but when we combined it together in a pile at the end of the beach clean, about an hour later, we had collected quite a pile of garbage and it was great to see that we played a small part in helping get it off the beach. This was definitely a fine example of a time when "many hands make for light work"!
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| There was lots of styrofoam on the beach |
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| How to dress right for a beach clean! Don't forget your smile :) (Yes, I know...very cheezy, ha ha!) |
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| This is why we hate balloons....bad, bad plastic pollution ending up in beaches everywhere! |
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