Weekend Walkabout: Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup

This weekend's walkabout was for a good cause. We're cleaning up the world's trashed beaches! All over the world, people who live on or near the beach are picking up the trash....

The first OCI trash team hits the beach just after sunrise.

But we're not only bagging the trash, we're gathering data. Every trash bag gets every little piece inside recorded, then crunched in a global database. We want to find out where the trash is coming from, how it landed on the beach, and how to stop more from coming. Recording hundreds of trashy bits can be odiferous and mucky, but it's worth it....

Recording the contents of a bag full of beach trash. Ew!

Our group logged several hundred "plastic bits", 12 buoy chunks, 3 flip-flops (all for the left foot), 3 balloons, 3 cans, one ancient bottle of booze, 3 fishing ropes, 50 plastic bottle tops, and over 100 pieces of food packaging. And that was just in one trash bag! Yuck! I also found some cool sea beans (including kapok prickles and hamburger beans), and earned a T-shirt, so though we got very sweaty and tired, I'm feeling pretty good. Now it's time for a cool lemonade in the garden, watched over by Jeffrey the Gnome. I was pleased to see that by the time our early-bird team was leaving, hundreds of people were combing the beach with black trash bags, as far as I could see north and south. I hope it's the same all over the planet today. Wonderful! Please leave a comment if you participated, let me know which country/beach you helped clean, and tell us what was the weirdest or grossest thing you found.

Pensive Tuesday: What Goes Around, Comes Around

I attended the International Sea-bean Symposium this weekend in Central Florida. It was so crowded, I couldn't even find a seat at several lectures! For those who don't live near a beach, sea-beans are wanderers of the sea, a type of flotsam that can eventually grow on a far shore. In our area, they are mostly seed pods and plant bits from the Caribbean and South America, which come up to us via the Gulf Stream. It's a fun hobby to collect them, and a very popular hobby, too, it would seem.  In addition to talks on sea-beans, there were several lectures on flotsametrics, the science of where flotsam starts, and where it lands, and what that reveals about our changing seas and currents.



Some sea-beans

I attended a lecture on what is happening to the flotsam from the horrific Japanese tsunami of March 11, 2011. A sentinel patch has come ashore on the West Coast of North America already, but the biggest part of the mess, about 2000 miles by 1000 miles in size, is about 500 miles offshore, and should be hitting us very soon. Most of it is styrofoam, yuck.  But there are also personal items, such as a basketball from a middle school that was destroyed. It came ashore in Washington State, and the girl who found it is going to Japan soon to return it to the school, which is being rebuilt. I was really touched by that. Fed Ex pilots are flying many personal possessions back to Japan to reunite the items with their owners. Sadly, many of the owners are dead or missing. But there have been some amazing successes. People can be wonderful.

The strangest part of the talk was the revelation that about 10% of the flotsam will be arriving on Atlantic shores. That's right, the Atlantic. Wrong ocean, right? But now that the Arctic has melted to such an extent, whatever floats from the Pacific Ocean into the Arctic Ocean eventually comes out the Atlantic Ocean. It travels, after a long while, via the Gulf Stream and is deposited on our beaches. Unbelievable. So Japanese tsunami flotsam should be arriving here about 2015 or thereabouts. Most of it will be styrofoam. But not all.

So my pensive thought from all this is that we really have just one big ocean, and just one long beach. What comes around goes around, and what goes around comes around.

This the left sole of a child's shoe, mineralized by its many years in the ocean. I found it about a month ago, along with about a dozen other shoes, all for the left foot. Go figure.... 

Happy Weekend With Plants and Sea-Beans!

The weekend started beautifully with a spectacular dawn over the ocean. Time to be up and about, watering mesembs and Tillies!

And this is just the third batch.  Good grief.  I'm also potting up some of the new Lithops this weekend. They are all French blue and green. So I've got a few pots to match that came out of the kiln a couple weeks ago:

And this weekend is the International Sea-bean Symposium, so I'll be heading there to catch a few lectures on sea glass, flotsam, sea-beans and ocean currents, and of course, buying the exclusive T-shirt!