What is in our oceans

January 13, 2020.  

We anchored at the Peck Lake anchorage.  Coming up to our turn to go into the anchorage, our depth gauge was showing [in feet]: 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 20, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33.  When we made our turn, it went: 33, 32, 30, 26, 24, 20, 16, 14, 9, 7, 6, 5.  All went well and we anchored successfully.

Until that night.  Dad was getting worried about our position in the anchorage.  It felt like we were dragging anchor toward a sailboat close by.  So sometime after dark we moved the boat to a better spot.  But we made a mistake that luckily didn't cost anything.  When you anchor a boat you back up to test it to see if you are set and the anchor is in position.  And the you do that there is a little metal snubber that takes the force of the boat being pulled by the anchor when being backed up.  We forgot to put that in place.  So our windlass which is only made to handle so much force clearly could not handle 85,000 lbs at 3 kts.  So its was pulled outwards and there was a violent chain rattling sound.  Luckily nothing bad happened.  But after that experience we always check to see if the snubber is in. The next morning was a great morning.  We put the tender in the water with our crane and boated to a shore on the ICW side of the narrow strip of land.  My Dad took a picture of me on this tree.

And then there is a little path we can walk through that takes us to the ocean front.  From a distance I could hear the roar of the surf, and really excited I ran out to the water.  Dad saw a cool crab on the way.  During our beach walk we grew less and less excited and more and more disappointed.  It was a beautiful beach but completely staggeringly trashed.  We picked up as much as we could that day given we had no bucket or gloves to carry the trash.  We just gathered it all up in an area so we could pick it up the next day in buckets and trash bags.

Everything you could imagine....  Bottle caps, bottles, shoes, a baseball helmet, laundry detergent, jugs of all different types (milk, water, etc.), straws, plastic cutlery, fishing nets and ropes, plastic bags and including two syringes of medical waste - one with its needle still in it. 

Then that's when I started to feel uncomfortable and wanted to put my shoes on because you don't really know what's under the sand.  The next day we came back tip buckets and bags and gloves and walked 100 ft on the beach north ands picked up about 20 lbs of trash.  100 ft!  That's it.

We collected our trash from the previous day.  Then we boated back on the tender and stuffed what we picked up in trash bags, soon to be deposited properly at our next marina.  The next day, we went back with the same equipment and picked up 15 lbs of trash.  100 ft in the other direction, south.

On the way back of that trip I couldn't help it.  I was so tired of picking up trash it was ruining the experience for me.  So I went to play in the water.  The waves created strange depth in the shoreline water.  Some areas were the waves are curling and breaking it dredges it all out.  Some areas it is ankle high.  We boated back in the tender took the trash and put in another trash bag. All in all we picked up 35-40 lbs of trash.  Now you might think that you've heard about this and its really bad and you understand that you want to not use straws.  But you can't really understand the sheer scale of all the trash unless you see it yourself in person.  And the main problem isn't really straws.  It was bottle caps..  Everywhere bottle caps, bottle caps, bottle caps.  We even spotted one from Haiti.  If you do live on a public beach where lots of people walk every day you may think its not that bad its because people are hired to pick up the trash on the beach.  Given all the hard work we had done we felt great.

The ocean is counting on you.  

What can you do to help it?

Find out here:  https://4ocean.com