Woot woot woot woot woot woot!!!! Yes! We have seven sea turtle nests on Wrightsville Beach and it is only June 20th People!!!!
Please keep our beach clean. It is good for YOU, it is good for ANIMALS, it is good for the SEA!
John and I had a beautiful walk this morning, but we did pick up a lot of trash. I think it is because the wind was blowing so hard over the weekend and items just got away from people.
Today was rather intriguing for me. We have an escarpment in zone 4 left by the weekend's wind and high tide. As I was walking, I saw something sticking up out of the sand right in the escarpment. I went to retrieve it and found it was a paint set. I have never found anything like that and I found it very interesting since I have been spending some time painting this year. (It was a New Year's Resolution of mine). There was also a piece of duct tape sticking out of the sand right beside the paint set. I could not pull it out because it was buried too deep, so I began to dig a hole in the escarpment. I could only imagine that these items got slammed by pounding waves against the shore line and became buried deep into the wet sand.
The hole I was digging reminded me of digging for turtle eggs as it was just a small circular hole that kept getting deeper and deeper, except for it was tunneling back instead of down. With each dig, I was pulling out more items. Inside that hole was soggy, wet, disintegrating paper. Part of the paper seemed like the remains of a wet cardboard box and a Star News newspaper from July 2014--it was folded at the obituaries. There was a ziploc bag that had "flowers July 8, 2014" written as the contents. The bag was moist inside, so the flowers had just become a brown smudge. There was a hard plastic reusable clear kitchen cup filled with seashells---I think this had been sealed closed at some point with duct tape. There was a tube of neutrogena sunscreen.
I dug until nothing more was found. My camera storage was full on my phone and so I did not take photos of this process. I am so curious as to the story behind these items. Were they forgotten on the beach this weekend? I think so because the paper was still somewhat intact. Were they sealed with duct tape inside a cardboard box? Were they intentionally left, and if so, was it by someone working through grief? So many mysteries are left by the sea to be held by the sea.
I will likely never know the story of these items, but they were meaningful to someone and the finding of them has become symbolic to me in some way that I'm still trying to figure out.
Below is the rest of what we had in our reusable trash bags:
10 cig butts (actually, there were lots of butts this morning, but I did not take the time to collect them)
42 food wrappers (10 of which were plastic sippy straw sleeves)
5 plastic bottle caps
3 plastic lids
9 straws (8 plastic and 1 paper)
1 plastic fork
1 metal kitchen knife
1 tangled fishing line
4 pieces of latex water balloons
1 piece of glass (not sea glass)
5 small plastic pieces
2 plastic grocery bags
6 other types of plastic bags
2 paper bags
7 plastic cups
2 foam cups
1 foam plate
1 pair of goggles
21 packaging items, including foam wrapping and paper tags
2 sunscreen bottles
4 strapping bands
4 tobacco packaging
2 clothing items
1 wash cloth
13 toys
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| Cookie Monster is guarding our nest! |
1 band aid
1 pair of scratched up Michael Kors aviator sunglasses (shucks on the "scratched up" part)
5 wet ones (these do not decompose people)
6 plastic streamers
16 pieces of paper and paper towels
Please please, when you come to enjoy the ocean, take 5-10 minutes to do a beach cleanup. It is a small gesture to enjoy so much. Plastic and other pollution is toxic to the oceans and the animals that live there. Don't you want to play and swim in a Clean Ocean? :-)
Thank you Gigi for keeping me company on this gorgeous day while I sorted the trash. You are the best!
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| Gigi!!!! |
Ginger
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