One Mans Garbage

As much as I don’t like to admit it, there are some interesting things on Facebook. I know what I said the other day, but that was then and this is now, many hours apart.

I was watching a video posted on the American Wayfarers site.  https://www.facebook.com/atlantic2pacificwalk/ I guess the Wayfarers are a couple walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I had assumed that they would have stopped on the west coast, but it seems that somehow they were able to walk halfway across the Pacific and managed to end up on Oahu. Good for them! Lucky them! If they can walk on water, can they also turn water into wine that would make them very popular amongst more than a few of my friends.

Anyways…

The video is of Makapu’u Beach Park which is just up the coast and around the corner from where we once stayed. This video shows the tide line and the detritus that the ocean left when the tide receded. There was the usual amount of sea weed and I suppose dead or dying aquatic life. There were also all sorts of bits and bobs of coloured things. Some of it looked like sea glass, some plastic and probably plastic bottles and flip-flops. There was a lot of stuff on that beach.

I think that the take away of the video is that aren’t we horrible to have dumped all of this crap in the ocean and now here it is washing up on the beaches of Paradise. Well, the American Wayfarers also washed up on the beach in Paradise. My favourite pastime when I go to a beach is to walk along the high tide line and look at the neat stuff that has washed up. As a general rule, Hawaii doesn’t have that much really interesting stuff, but still enough to pique my interest, and of course you are walking along a beach in Hawaii.

The beach on the west side of Vancouver Island has much more interesting things. Once I saw a ball of twine/string/rope that was the size of a small car. I spent a few minutes wondering how long it would take to unravel it, but I doubt anyone could. I had heard that once a ship carrying hundreds of thousands of Adidas running shoes capsized and the shoes all washed up on shore. People spent hours trying to find pairs of matching shoes of the correct size. Once when I was hopping from rock to rock, I hopped onto a dead, bloated seal that was fun. Often I would see bottles and cans from foreign countries that had been tossed over the side of a ship. The lucky few have found glass buoys from Japanese fishing boats. I don’t think they use them any longer, but maybe.

We have beaches here in Calgary,

 http://blog.buzzbishop.com/calgary/best-beaches-in-calgary/

But as you can see, only one really qualifies as a beach and that one is shut down half the summer due to fecal contamination. Also, there isn’t really a high tide line and nothing of any interest ever washes up on the shore.

No, ocean beaches are the way to go, and we should stop dumping garbage in the ocean. But, as the saying goes “…one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure…”