DAY 3

The Damned Creek

 

Hard to prepare for the mountains of rubbish we encountered in Endeavour Bay today, a beach that had never been visited by Team Clean. Matt had done a fly over but hadn’t fully identified the hidden, buried and sludge-filled debris that awaited us in the creek.

 

Initially we dispersed along the beach, after our steam down from the shelter of Hibbs Pyramid, up into the camp site and northern creek to begin scouring while Matt and Masaki went on ahead to scout the southern end. Soon word got back that we needed to meet in the southern creek to begin the mammoth task of clearing decades of ropes, buoys, fish bins, water bottles, food containers, bait savers, bait straps and random pieces of broken-down plastic. 

 

It was a devastating sight. Years of wild weather had tangled ropes that clogged the creek, damming up the flow and then creating catch points to trap newer layers of rope, to be layered over by sludge, vegetation and driftwood. 

 

 

Teams and pairs got knee deep in sludge pulling at ropes only to find they were buried metres underground, requiring tenacious effort to free them. Dozens of lengths of cray ropes, estimated to be 80 meters in length, were coiled and tangled amongst the driftwood. We worked for hours in the heat, dodging and swatting marsh flies, and steering clear of snakes in the cutting grass.

 

Amongst the debris were the largest whale bones any of the veteran cleaners had seen. A vertebra about a metre across and approx. 40-cm deep was lodged deep in the dammed creek. A jawbone along the beach disappeared deep into the sand with another 4-meter whale bone not far away. A white, organic, oily, mass on the rocks was possibly baleen. Speculation about the species was rife. 

 

Despondent team cleaners took a well-earned break for lunch delighting in a swim and soak in the natural spa pools in the rocks. Refreshed and ready to finish this massive job, we tackled the last of the buried ropes and got it all bagged up. The plan for this load was to pack it into large bags that’ll be helicoptered out, saving us the back-breaking work of hauling it up the beach and loading it onto the dingy to be ferried out to the boats. Five x 2 cubic meter bulka-bags now wait for a pickup next month.

 

In the history of the clean-up, we’ve never left rubbish behind to be collected by a helicopter. A few dozen bags were carried back to the boats with micro plastics and small ropes collected on the final sweep of the beach and campsites. It was sweet relief to know our counting session would be short and potentially finished before dinner. A long, exhausting day wasn’t going to seep long into the night. 

 

We returned to our respective boats, unpacked, packed and met onboard the Velocity for the hectic count as we steamed to The Mulcahy. What fun, a moving boat, a mess of rubbish on deck and a reduced count. Final count on Velocity was 1,172 small and micro pieces. 

 

Arriving in The Mulcahy we soon had a sumptuous dinner prepared by our in-house chef Masaaki and his eager helpers. Fresh seafood caught by our skippers and prepared so expertly is such a treat. A huge thank you to all our sponsors for keeping us so well supplied. It’s hungry work and there’s nothing better at the end of the day than kicking back, well fed and happy to have left the beach in a much better state than we found it in.