Day 206 - July, 27 2011

life guard tower 26 - Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA

trash collected for 20 minutes

10.3 pounds

775.8 pounds total

It's summer! And I'm back to the beach that started it all for me. With a whopping 10.3 pounds of trash collected in just 20 minutes, I'm reminded why I started this crazy project in the first place.

Summer on the beach equals sand toys. And sand toys are the Velveteen Rabbits of their toy genre. Beloved, but then tossed aside and forgotten. For a more updated example, think Toy Story. Although the fate of these little guys, unlike their Tom Hanks counter parts, is a crash course swimming lesson that make take them to distant shores....and possibly other grateful hands....until? 

Meet the modern sand shovel. Many, MANY plastic cups get a second life as a sand scoop, but soon meet the same fate as the above toy. 

As I was picking up trash for the first time since we left in March, I remembered how much I love doing this. I love picking up trash! What a funny proclamation, and it may be stretching the truth. What I love is this:

- feeling useful

- feeling like I may be making a difference by engaging someone strolling the beach in a conversation they didn't expect to have about what I'm doing and why

- taking photographs of the Southern California beach at sunset. The real low point of all of this. Not. 

- thinking about what I want to share with you in my upcoming post as I walk along, paying closer attention to my observations and thoughts than I might normally rushing around in the day to day of it all.

I was off my game a bit. I set my bag aside, got the camera ready, watched a wave come in close to this chapstick, and thought how perfect it would be to get the water in the background. 

NOT remembering that when I have cared more about the shot, than the said object in front of me, and let the incoming tide sweep it away before my shutter clicks, that I feel awful. 

To simplify: I don't want to sacrifice the plastic object getting sucked into the ocean for a nice shot to share with you. Not the point. The point for me is to get the stuff off the beach. There will be other shots. 

Luckily, this little beauty got swept further onto the beach rather than back out with the wave in time for me to remember this lesson. 

I saw my friend Dean down at the beach this morning. I've been body surfing with a new group of friends who are fast feeling like friends I've had for years. Anyway, Dean was part of the inspiration to get my butt back onto the sand. He's been out with me a few times now. 

It's true that I set the rule for myself that my cleanups can be non-consecutive, but the days were clicking by since I updated The Daily Ocean about our research trip, and I still wasn't feeling the inspiration to start back up with my 20 minute collections. 

Perhaps I wasn't ready to come back until now. I needed to digest the experiences we had while we sailed from Chile to Tahiti. My perspective has changed. 

I kept wondering how all of this was going to fit into my beach cleanup project. But one day out here, and I remembered exactly why I spend a fair portion of my time on this project. 

Regardless of the other issues plaguing our ocean that I witnessed, and will surely talk about on here, trash is a huge problem for the beach down the street from me. A stream of mostly plastic debris gets sucked into Santa Monica Bay everyday. 

One insight I gained from getting in the water in remote places while away, was that our sharks need help. Summer always brings sensationalized news of shark bites in the usual places. But we are the real predators. It's hard to wrap our heads around the fact that we are wiping out a highly evolved species that have been around since before the dinosaurs. We are. 

Go check out LANDSHARK SKATEBOARDS to learn more.