It’s a mission to get to most of the surf spots on the British Columbia coast.
There’s a stretch of paved road from Tofino to Ucluelet, and a few logging roads that bump and wind their way to some of the lesser-known breaks, but for the most part getting to the beach means either a long boat trip or an even longer schlep on foot. Getting in is tough, and getting anything out is even tougher, especially when it comes to coastal cleanups. The hundreds of kilometres of shoreline here collect uncountable tons of flotsam and jetsam carried eastward on the currents, but the access challenges make it really difficult to get any of it out, even if you want to. So most of it just sits there, breaking down into ever-smaller pieces of foam and plastic that soak into the coastal environment.
Surfrider Vancouver Island has been organizing monthly beach cleanups for most of its 10-year history, and five years ago some of our chapter members decided to start doing something about marine debris on the more remote beaches. Each year, the chapter raises funds to get a crew of volunteers out to some out-of-the-way spot on the coast—we camp for a few days, ride waves, collect as much garbage as we can, then haul it out for recycling or disposal back in Victoria, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. BC Parks and the Canadian Coast Guard have stepped in to help; everyone knows the beaches need attention, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have some well-established sponsors step up to support the initiative we call Combing the Coast.
This past summer, we chose a beach near the northern end of the Island. There’s no road access, but you can either hike in or canoe down a river to the coast. We invariably find a mind-boggling amount of garbage on these remote cleanups, and this year was no different—everything from plastic bottles to lost net floats and rusted-out propane tanks. The big stuff is the most dramatic, but the small stuff is the most depressing—the little shards of plastic and kernels of styrofoam that lie in the tideline like a leavings from a late-season snow.
On this trip, our crew walked the shoreline for three days, hauling everything back to the sandbar in front of our camp to be bagged and sorted. We’d allocated some of this year’s funds for a few hours of heli time, so we could get cargo nets full of collected debris to the truck we’d left at the trailhead; there was over 3000 pounds of it in total, and hiking it all out would’ve been a near-impossible task. Burning a bit of jet fuel seemed like a worthwhile trade for getting that much toxic junk off the beach.
The amount of garbage that’s tossed up on surf beaches around the world can seem pretty daunting, but these remote beach cleanups always give me a bit of hope and remind me that small groups of motivated citizens have the power to make a measurable difference. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it feels good to be getting started.
Thanks to Mick Sheinberg and Dan Adelman for organizing this year’s Combing the Coast trip, and to HtO, Coastline, Sitka, the Vancouver Aquarium, Vancouver Island Brewery, BC Parks and Ellice Recycle for the support.
