September 17th was Shoreline Cleanup Day across the SF Bay Area. The idea is simple: there’s a lot of trash on our beaches, in our estuaries, along our shorelines, etc. and to give wildlife a chance we’d need to help pick up and put some of that away. There were multiple volunteer sites through out the East Bay, and I joined volunteers at the Jack London Aquatic Center to help out. Sign-in was at 9:30am, and by that time there was already a lot of people showing up to the event.
We were separated into two different queues, one was for land-based volunteers, and the other for water-based volunteers. The lady manning the water-based volunteer station asked me what water craft I’d be using for the day.
I have a paddle board.
And how long have you been paddling?
Quite a while now, I’d say. May be a couple of years?
And how competent are you?
I can rescue myself =D
And that was the end of that conversation =P I signed my life away on the waiver form, putting down my name, address, and phone number, picked up my gloves, trash bag, and plastic grabber, then waited around for another 30 minutes until they gathered us all around the main area and briefed us over safety issues and such. The key point being, if there was anything that I didn’t want to touch with my bare hands (broken bottles, needles, dead animals or birds, feces, etc.) then I should raise my hand (or hands) and ask the group leader to come over for help. That was straightforward enough, hopefully I won’t have any problem for the day.
The water-base volunteers were further divided up into three teams, with one heading to the shore just across from the public dock at Jack London Aquatic Center, another one going to shore just around the corner, and the third one (supposedly the most advanced paddlers) would head to the furthest beach from the launching dock. I chose to join the third group, which has four people in total: the group leader Davina, who used a paddle board, two kayakers in Vickie and Hans, and myself.
When we got to the beach, a family of three were about done picking up trash on one side of it. We said our greetings, then decided to proceed with our own clean up effort. It was a small beach, but heaps of trash can be found throughout. Most of the trash were small items like straws, plastic bottles, floss, bottle caps, etc. There was a few big items as well, including an entire sofa cushion (or one that looked like it). I, myself, also found 3 needles, with all being properly capped. Seeing them was disheartening nevertheless. I’ve been sheltered throughout my entire life, have never dealt with drugs, and have only seen things reported in newspapers and on televisions; this is as close to the action as I had ever been. Getting up close and personal with these discarded items really opened my eyes to the state of well-being of the Oakland Estuary and the people of Oakland in general. I was definitely a bit disappointed to have reality hit me in the face like this.
As a side note, I was watching a YouTube channel where some guy was magnet fishing a canal in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) – Bondi Treasure Hunter was the channel – and there are lots of trash down below the water surface over there in that country as well. So may be this is not limited to just Oakland and America, and that it’s really a problem everywhere.
In any case, we spent a good 2+ hours picking up as much trash as we possibly could. There were still a lot to be done, but at least when we left the beach, it was a tiny bit better than we first got there. We paddled back to the Jack London Aquatic Center around 12:45pm, threw all of the trash we found into a large container parked next to the gathering area earlier in the day. It wasn’t much paddling overall, but I did pick up lots of trash… I think the amount of workout is probably equivalent to a 6-7 mile paddle =P
Next week, I’ll go to the world-famous Napa Valley, and will paddle the Napa River. Stay tuned =)