Surfrider Trashcan Day

Saturday Cyndi and I helped Surfrider install 12 new trashcans at 4 different beaches here in Rincon. We started at 7:30 in the morning at the offices Surfrider rents out of a house near Steps Beach. Wess, the Surfrider, Rincon Chairman and Roger, who owns Surf 787, a surf camp and guest villa in the hills above Rincon, http://surf787.com/Surf787OurLocation.html had already started loading the materials in their cars. Roger donated all the materials; barrels, posts and concrete. There were a couple other people there, but it was looking like it might be a long day if more post hole diggers didn't show up.

We dropped off the trashcans, posts and cement at each location and made our way to the furthest beach, Domes, and started digging holes. Luckily a few more guys showed up and Roger really knew what he was doing so the work went pretty quick. Domes has the biggest parking lot of all the beaches we were doing that day and already had 4 trashcans but needed more so we installed 4 more trashcans in 2 seperate areas. The biggest factors on where to install the cans were putting them where they could be emptied by the municipal trash trucks and not blocked by parked cars, also they needed to be placed where they would get used, not out of the way where more than a few yards walk would be involved. There are also drainage and vista issues we needed to think about and a few places where the ground was too hard to dig.

Indicators, the beach just south of the lighthouse, didn't have any trashcans so we installed 2 at the start of the trail that leads to the beach. Next stop was Maria's which is a very popular spot and will be a focus in future Surfrider projects. There were 2 cans there and we installed 2 more. Finally we installed 2 more trashcans at Steps, to make a total of 4 there. About 10 people ended up showing up and most of the work was done by 11am.

As I wrote before, Cyndi worked on a beach cleanup day with Surfrider, Rincon about a month ago and I'm sure we'll be doing plenty more, but hopefully these trashcans will help keep the trash out of the water between those days. We got to meet a few interesting people, all but one North Americans, most fairly recently moved here. After speaking with more and more people we notice that there are alot of people who live here awhile and eventually leave. Either they can't make a good income or they get sick of the small town life or it's just time to try another spot on the globe. I can't help but wonder how Cyndi and I will feel about Rincon after one, two or even five years of life here, but hope we're still interested in making it a better place.

Let the Preaching Begin....

While I was in Los Angeles for a week, Cyndi volunteered at a Surfrider beach cleanup here in Rincon. They worked at Maria's which is a beautiful spot where we take the dogs often. They picked up at least 15 bags of trash; bottles, glass, cans, straws, clothes and all other sorts of trash that people take with them to the beach or that the wind blows onto the beach from the nearby road.

Surfrider held this beach cleanup day as a worldwide event, so beaches all over Rincon, the Caribbean and the rest of the Earth were made cleaner on this single day by volunteers like Cyndi. Obviously the cleanup makes the beach nicer, but so much trash effects the animal and plant life in and out of the water. I recently saw a documentary where oceanographers were tracking a giant cluster of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. It was hundreds of miles long and wide, made up of water bottles, fishing line, 6-pack holders and small plastic globules that are used in industrial plastic manufacturing. It was disturbing to see the amount of trash that had made it's way out to sea and the effect it was having on the sea life.

It seems pretty obvious that we need to take care of our oceans, but apparently not to everyone. At the risk of sounding preachy, next time you're at the beach, take a few minutes to pick up any trash you see; even if everyone doesn't do it, for those that do it will make a huge difference, and it makes you feel good.

The Rincon chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, http://www.surfrider.org/rincon/index.php is headed by Wes Merten. He held a meeting on Thursday, so we went to see what they were working on. There were only about 8 other people there, which even though a lot of people from Rincon are out of town this time of year, seems like a very low amount considering it's such a wave-loving community. The next project is installing 24 new trashcans at some of the beaches around Rincon. It's great that Surfrider has the money and the connections to be able to do this kind of thing as it makes keeping the beaches clean a little easier if there are less excuses not to.

Cyndi and I are both looking forward to being more involved with Surfrider and a few other organizations here in Rincon that make the town a better place to live. We're setting our roots here and it's important for us to work toward improving our environment and not leave it up to someone else.