Clean Up the World Weekend 2009 (Continued)

19 September 2009

Outer Tubes and Honeymoon Bay

Honeymoon Bay is a beautiful place to camp and a top spot for a bit of lunch too!

With lunch over we jumped back into the vehicles and headed out to Target beach for round two. Pete and Damo had spent some time around the area in March when we held an event on the peninsula for Clean Up Australia Day and reckoned it was in need of some attention.

Well, what we saw when we got there left us all looking at that pair saying, ‘What did you drag us all the way out here for?”. Pristine white sand, turquoise waters and not a piece of rubbish as far as the eye could see!

Earlier on we mentioned that one of our volunteers Julie had done a great job, well this was evident when we had to start heading south and get up into the bush before we found anything at all. Once again, thanks for your efforts Julie!

Once we did get up into the scrub things took a bit of a turn for the worse. A myriad of old long neck bottles and cans that would precede construction on the ark had Kurt and Christian rummaging around trying to dig these things out and keeping regular commentary on brands of beer that have been out of circulation for twenty years!

Just as the first Clean Up bag was filled the sound of the quad bike pushing its way through the bush made itself evident. Glen had come down to lend a hand and ran into Kurt and Christian’s veritable gold mine of antiquities.

Another three bags were filled before Glen did the first run out and Kurt called for reinforcements and more bags. Enter Damo, Jacob, Mick and Spyross. As you can see from the photos above there was still plenty of work left for them and they were up to the task too!

The condition of the area was quite similar to what we found last year when ‘Ledge Care’ came to Lobster Bay on the northern side of the peninsula. Reminisce of ancient meeting sites that can really only be attributed to the roads that used to provide vehicular access to these places. These days its a bit of a hike in but its quite obvious that there’s been very little left since the tracks were put out of service.

Road closures and restricting access are one thing but these results can also point to a change of values. You don’t see people driving into the bush and emptying several cases of beer while sitting on the tailgate of a Ute, throwing the empties in every possible direction and deducting points when one bottle hits another. It must have been max points for maximum distribution in those days!

We can’t be sure that people are drinking more responsibly now-a-days but there are definitely less of those sort of capers going on.

Moving off the beach we loaded the utes up again and headed back to the gate house for a debrief. Once the rubbish was all loaded onto one vehicle we got an opportunity to see just how much of a difference our days work had made.

A little later truck was weighed, before and after, on the Navy weigh bridge with the difference coming out at 1.26 Tonnes! Now that was a surprise to us and an awesome end result for the event.

Shimano Australia lent its support to the event by offering up a rod and reel as a door prize. None of us could have written a better script than the draw going to one of our junior members, Cooper Arellano. The juniors really put in a huge effort for the day and did a power of work.