For several years, the Spirit of Adventure Trust has been working with the Sir Peter Blake Trust to help clean up New Zealand’s coastlines. We put our forty trainees ashore on a remote beach, and spend a couple of hours collecting and cataloguing any rubbish found. This data is sent back to the organisers who collate it all, and a break down is available on-line. Voyage 546 was a bit different. On the 3rd and 4th of April, a new group called Sustainable Coastlines had organised a huge clean up of Great Barrier Island. As the Spirit of New Zealand was in the vicinity anyway, we were invited to take part. School children and adults were shipped in to Tryphena harbour from all around Auckland, fishing boats played their part collecting the rubbish and taking it away. We were asked if we could handle Katherine bay, and said ’sure’.
Thus began the largest beach clean I have ever been involved in. Katherine Bay comprises more than 20 nautical miles of shoreline, and our 40 trainees and ten crew trawled through a sizeable portion of it throughout the day. Among other things we collected were a massive motorway traffic barrier and half an aluminium boat, along with the more usual piles of plastic, glass and metal fragments. Broken buoys and huge piles of netting from mussel farms were also in large number, posing a huge danger to the fragile marine eco-system.
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New Zealand prides itself on its clean, green, natural reputation. It is quite shocking to consider the reality – that one virtually uninhabited island off the coast has so much rubbish, the majority obviously carried there by the currents from Auckland. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the SoNZ, most of the rubbish had been collected by another boat, but I am trying to get access to some photos that others in the crew took. I will post them here when I do. Sam Judd has also promised to put more information on their website, and I’ll update this with links if they do.
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