The morning started out with a trash clean up. We had been promised a clean up if Dr. Girlchrist found any trash on the beach where we are and sure enough some plastic sample bags showed up yeserday with some algae in them so we were originally going to clean up TBR's beach front but when we woke up we were surprised with not only a beach cleanup but also the fact that it was on the other side of the island in the East Village. I wasn't too excited because hauling all of our trash back was going to be awful. We all headed over and cleaned for a while, both on their beach front and in the area that was covered by vegetation just a little further in shore. It was really surprising to see that the actual beach front was almost spotless. It was further back where the branches and the roots had caught the trash that was bad. It was covered. Living on an island there isn't really an opportunity to be a conscious recycle-er and such so most of the trash is burned behind the village because it's too expensive to take it anywhere else. Looking around you had no trouble finding trash of all kinds from broken children's toys to tiny spoons from disposable snacks to entire sheets to whole shoes. It was really eye opening that while all of these people depended on their environment heavily they couldn't really do anything to help it very much. The worst by far was the Styrofoam bits everywhere. We had talked about the night before in class about the North Atlantic Gyre. I am sure many of you have heard about the Great pacific one that is the size of Texas in the Pacific but the Atlantic has one too, maybe a smidge smaller but it's still there and it's not any worse.
We would look down trying to pick up as many tiny pieces as we could and then dump them in the bags look down and everything looked exactly the same. It would take days to pick up everything that was there and we had 11 people on the job! The other interesting though that crossed my mind was, so we go and look down plastic bags being everywhere but we, who call ourselves the ocean stewards. use the same kind of plastic bags to pick everything up. It's always a challenge no matter what you do. After picking up for a while and filling all o the bags that we had brought we were all starting to dread the walk back but had a happy surprise waiting for us: the school bus boat was taking everyone back!
After surviving the tiny boat ride back to our dock, many decided to take a break and rest before hopping back to our projects. I already mentioned that a little so I'll skip to the evening. Everything was fairly normal until there was a spat about a sign that wanted to be hung by a student with some of the staff's signs (these are the kind that say a location and how far away it is). After everyone cooled down there was some tension, but overall just another day in the life.
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