Day 6 blog

Day 6: Thursday 10th March 2016

Guest Blogger: Piece of garbage.

Hi guys, I am a plastic water bottle!

I was made from oil and I had a brief life in somebody's backpack and then they dropped me IN PUBLIC in a beach carpark somewhere in western Australia!
I was gutted, but thought things would get better when a friendly dude put me in the bin, however the bin didn't have a lid and was kind of overloaded. A crow pulled me out and I blew into the water. I was all over the shop on the rebound!

I bumped around near the beach for a few days until an offshore wind carried me out into the Leeuwin current which took me on a very interesting journey down the coast and across the great Australian bight, along the way some playful Dolphins tossed me around but I toughed it out.
Then the current split and sent me south along the Tasmanian coast. Wild times.

Along the way I slowly filled with water and lost my labels. I think I saw a turtle swallow one of them, oops, good luck with that big fella!

One day a fierce westerly wind blew me up onto a stony beach, where I was pinned under a Huon pine log for about a year and I fully lost it in the sun! No joke, I lost the top part of my lid and I started to fall to pieces. I looked terrible too.
A winter storm blew me into the ferns behind the beach and my crackup continued, some of my flakes blew into a creek on the beach and made it back into the sea.  See ya kids!

But today the weirdest thing happened, A big guy in blues-brothers sunglasses called Lachy came along and wrenched me out of the ferns and shoved me into a bag with some shotgun shells, lots of stinking rope and some other bottles (one was even from Indo!) I needed a cheer up and I got it when Lachy got nailed by the jack-jumper ants that were living in the ferns. Oh how I laughed!!

Now I'm in a pile of common junk on the back deck of a boat with music blaring and stuff flying everywhere... Woah! Hang on, someone has put me into a bag with other bottles and we're being transferred to another boat.
I'm confused but hopeful for the future. Do I dare hope that things will improve? If I'm lucky I'll get recycled and get to live on as a fleece jacket or garden furniture. Wish me luck!

Thanks piece of garbage, what a great blog! Cheers and good luck for the future!

Schools report by Pat Spiers.

This morning the crew of the Velocity sneaked away at first light again! Those guys! As usual they wanted to investigate some possible surf spots on the way to today's cleanup location.

The other two boats followed an hour or so behind, heading north along the coast towards the wild beaches near Hobbs island.

There was a large sea rolling in from the Southern ocean and our boats felt very small as they climbed up and plunged down the swells while the dolphins and albatross played around us. I listened to music on my headphones and it

We finally anchored just east of Hobbs island. Lachy quickly put a fishing line in and got a bit cross when he could only catch Barracouta (his least favourite fish). We all got a wake-up on the whiteknuckle zodiac dinghy ride zooming across the waves of the bay to our first beach. "Green island main". The team has been to this small beach 4 times in the past and it is still very dirty. Ula had been telling us about this beach all week, she described how when they first visited and stepped ashore everyone was in shock when they saw the thousands and thousands of rubbish pieces threaded through the thick carpet of SLIMY ROTTING KELP that covers most of this beach.

I'm not going to pretend to be a tough guy here, it was really disgusting getting down close to the rancid kelp slop and picking out bits of rope and plastic. It was a sunny and warm and so the smell got worse and worse as the day went on. The slop was actually making a foul slimy squelching noise on it's own as it steadily decomposed. Yucko!

We hadn't come this far to be quitters, so we worked away for a few hours and pulled 18 stinking bags of rubbish off the beach. It actually looked much, much better.
I thought the funniest things were when Oscar found a number 2 (ie, a small plastic numeral) and Alecia found a plastic alien figurine with a weird horn.

We were relieved to get away from the beach and move one kilometre south to Duckhole beach which is another beach made of stones, however beneath almost every stone is a scrap of trawl rope. We clambered around on our hands and knees for a few more hours picking up rope and a large amount of shotgun shells. It was a much nicer beach except for the Jack Jumper ants that got Lachy and I when we were pulling bottles out of the bracken ferns behind the beach.

Once we had ferried all the garbage and people back to the boats we sailed North to a pretty little bay called the Gulch (Lat: 43 07.109 S   Long:145 42.004) Where we counted all the stinking rubbish from the day.
The team counted 13,229 pieces of small plastic alone from the first stinky beach alone. A massive effort!

After a 3 hour long count we slurped down some Abalone pasta dropped into a deep sleep after a very, very long day.

....and then the mosquitoes arrived..

See you soon,

Pat