The last few beach clean ups have had some record turnouts. Huge thanks to everyone coming out and helping. People were still pulling in when I was taking the picture.
We usually have about 8 to 10 people that you could call a core group. They come to most, if not all of the clean ups. As of late we have been seeing more and more volunteers, which is great! Keep that stuff up! We had 34 people this Sunday and 32 last Sunday. That is a lot of volunteer hours for parks.
This week we cleaned from the Southside of the Indian River inlet to the south end of 3Rs at the poles. This is one of the easier beaches to clean it doesn’t take that long to walk the entire beach. A few volunteers helped with DNREC”s Mylar Balloon survey.
The beach was “blown” clean for the most part yesterday, but we always manage to find trash. “After last week’s clean up we took the girls to Cape Henlopen and they spent all day pointing out and picking all of the trash. You don’t realize how much is here until you really start looking, and then you can’t stop seeing it everywhere”.
This is one of the reasons we do clean ups, not just to get trash off the beach, but to educate people, especially kids. We can sign any community volunteer paperwork your kids need to take care of just come out and help.
One thing more people do is collect even more trash. We have filled three large trash bags each weekend. The small pieces that are broken down from all kinds of different products is the biggest problem. We find a lot of small pieces, and tons of bottle caps.
Huge thanks to Iron Hill Brewery for feeding the troops. We have another restaurant offering to feed the clean up crews in Lewes. We are working on that and will announce that at the next clean up, March 31st at Fenwick Island State park, meet at the bathhouse at 9 AM.
Fish On!
Rich King
