ALBAA Lower Hunter Environmental Action Catherine Hill Bay

11 January 2009

On the 11th January 2009 ALBAA members held ‘Ledge Care’ event number three at the ledge known to members as the ‘Glass House’.

After receiving reports through the members internet forum a clean up at Catherine Hill Bay was imminent. This is a ledge that the Lower Hunter and Central Coast Teams have put a considerable amount of man hours into and the Christmas crew proved the punters were no better educated. With a break in both Shad and my personal schedules we set about arranging a team to take this mess on. Running on a very short time frame to get the job done, ALBAA member Mark Williams jumped on board straight away while our Ledge Care Co-ordinator Christian got on the blower to Clean Up Australia. I made a quick call to Kym at Lake Macquarie City Council and we had made the necessary arrangements within 24hrs. All we had to decide from here on in was were to fish! Shad and I discussed the matter at length deciding to break form the usual protocol and fish a different location, settling on Wybung head. While this is not the way things are usually done, to Shad and I, Catho represents the place we started fishing LBG and after Shad had allready been down to contain most of the rubbish we just didn’t want to have to try and wet a line knowing the state of the place.

The fishing wasn’t quite what we had hoped but it was good to see Wybung in much the same state as the Central Coast and Lower Hunter guys left it in after the last clean up. This had us in high spirits even if the fishing didn’t!

Time marched on while the conversation roamed freely and we decided to pull stumps and get in and out of Catho in smart fashion and just get the job done. On arrival we were greeted with said mess and the positivity left from the environmental conditions at Wybung quickly evaporated. It seemed that the glass smashing crew had been in fine form again and doing very few personal relations favours for the Tooheys product, Extra Dry. While we got on with it we noticed the same old rubbish, now had I been a tracker in a past life I reckon I would have been able to lead you to their door aswell! Some interesting items were found and included a hypodermic syringe full of tuna oil and a box of freezer brought Calamari. If you put two and two together here, like we did, you might come to the conclusion that these guys had gone to a fair amount of trouble to get there gear together but totally missed the part about taking it out with them!! Just to be fair to the Extra Dry crew, at this point I must say, that they weren’t the ones with the oil laced squid either. This lot seemed to prefer coal roasted something or other as was obvious by the remains of the make shift camp grill on the ledge. In their defence I would have to admit that we thought this was preferable to the pickled chilli’s left by the other crew. Someone had a bit of spare cash here because we found a fair amount of PE braid discarded on the rocks as well.

In summary we pulled three bags containing eighteen Kilo’s of rubbish off the ledge which included a quarter of its weight in broken glass. After two previous events at this location and finding much the same litter we can only assume that the same people are doing the same old thing down here and we just keep missing them. As a result of all of this the Lower Hunter Team has made a formal approach to Lake Macquarie City Council Requesting signage at this location.