Clear the Coast 2024 September

It’s truly amazing what we can accomplish with teamwork and adequate funding. We don’t have the final numbers on this year’s marine debris cleanup yet and won’t have for some time, but it would appear that Living Oceans and partners brought in nearly 40 tonnes of plastic marine debris this year—much of it from the Scott Islands, a hotspot of biodiversity and therefore also of risk for plastic entanglement and consumption. 

Partnering with Quatsino and Tlatlasikwala First Nations, Lonepaddle Conservationists Society and Rugged Coast Research Society, we applied to the Province’s Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative Fund with a project focused on the Scott Islands, but also including the Cape Scott Trail and the northwest coast’s water-access-only beaches that we’ve cleaned for the past 10 years.  

The difference we’ve made with that decade of work (funded by all of you, thank you very much!) was starkly apparent: on the beaches we clean annually, we picked up between 2-4 of cubic metres of debris. On Lanz Island, which has never been cleaned before, Rugged Coast filled 240 supersacks (about 1.5 cubic metres apiece). Cox Island, which we’ve cleaned in day-trips a few times over the years, yielded about 150 cubic metres plus 25 barrels, 50 large floats, 3 large pallets and a couple of dozen tires. 

There were some impressive moments on this trip, but the one that I’ll never forget is the sight of the team working together on Cox Island to roll a massive bundle of hawser and heavy electrical cable out of a streambed. It had to weigh at least 700 lb, soaking wet and full of mud. The hawser alone was so large and heavy that to bag it, we had to cut it into pieces and leave it in the sun to dry before lifting it into several lift bags. Everyone was covered in mud, soaked and elated! 

Picking up the debris and bagging it was challenging enough, but transporting it to landfill/recycling was fraught. We realized early in the Lanz cleanup that there was far too much debris to take out by helicopter alone—we needed a barge. We organized helicopters, tug, barge and trucking for September 8-9, only to find the weather closing in before we’d lifted a quarter of the debris.  

The whole operation had to be reorganized for September 14-15, with the threat of a major storm on the horizon. We booked three helicopters, determined to get the job done. The night before it was all to happen, we found ourselves 2 helicopters down: one pilot concerned about weather and one machine with mechanical issues. Our hats are off to pilot Wylie at Kestrel Helicopters, whose impressive longlining skills and efficiency enabled him to load the remaining 300-odd bags, all while moving our ground crew about from cache to cache! 

David Jensen (Lonepaddle) worked with us throughout the season, right through until the last bag was sorted, weighed and left at the marine debris recycling depot. His paddleboard expertise allowed him to access beaches that we can’t get to by boat. He single-handedly cleaned the pocket beaches from Cape Russell to Cape Scott, as well as several more on Cox Island.