Bramble Scramble

Day 6!

 

Three days in and I thought time had stood still. Now I’m afraid it’s coming to an end all too quickly. We headed to Bramble Cove this morning after a beautiful drizzly sunrise — a beach inside Port Davey — somewhere you wouldn’t think the toxic plastic crap would have reached, but there it was, on mass, although this time it was small, tiny in fact. The rope had broken down to tiny individual strands, 0.2 of millimetre strands spread everywhere. This is what I set my sights on collecting, and once I had my eye in it had found its way into every tiny corner of everything, sponges, wrapped around seaweed, rocks, sticks big and small, Neptune’s necklace (a type of kelp). The variety of kelp matched the variety of micro plastic (think of fairy bread filled with hundreds and thousands and you’ll get the idea). We made the most of it though, had some music playing and we found a groove that allowed us to settle in and focus on a patch and sit there for 3 hours in one square metre filling a small plastic bag with thousands of plastic pieces. Then back to the big boats that were rafted up in Schooner Cove where we were taking refuge from the 70kmh winds and an 8m rolling swell. One group set out to find surf for the afternoon while the others stayed behind, carved spoons and jammed. Our surfing crew had to cross the Breaksea islands to get to Earle Point where we surfed. With the backdrop of Erskine range and Mount Stokes, in this lost world we felt right at home, catching our breath in this awe-inspiring wonder. The natural beauty of the remoteness of the southwest reminded me of how crazy it was to see so many fine particles of plastic and yet how humbling it was to be able to be here and be a part of this mammoth effort to remove, collate and reference all this waste.   

 

Back at the boat a group of crew stuck around to settle into the afternoon sunshine. It seems that once one of our musicians picks up their instrument, it isn’t long until the full band is in swing. Fully amped up, with nothing less than a full drumkit and the beautiful mountain range in the background, this has got to be one of the rarest gigs to play in the southern hemisphere. 

9196 items collected, classified and counted on a wild cloud sunset.

 

Words by Stu and Alice.

Photo by Jimmy.