Evans Bay Beach & Clean Up

The guys from Sea Shepherd joined our Petone Wharf Clean Up event last September and since then we have been working towards combining for another big clean up event in the Wellington area.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t looking too conducive for diving so we cancelled the club dive. However on arrival at the beach Rachel & I decided that it didn’t actually look that bad and we should check out the site for future dives.

Getting Ready to Dive

As we dropped down a couple of metres it looked really clean, 3-4m vis and sandy.
I was wondering if we would find anything underwater or were we just going to hide out blowing bubbles to avoid the hard work happening along the beach.

However as we headed out and reached the 5-7m mark the bottom conditions changed with a bit more weed and rubble and we started to pick up plenty of rubbish. There were a large number of plastic bags – primarily supermarket & bait bags along with food wrappers, cans & bottles and other unidentifiable pieces of plastic. We also found a hat, a mask, a shirt and a wallet!

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All the rubbish was checked for life and we tried to decritter everything underwater but the other volunteers checked our rubbish on the beach and discovered a few more cushion stars and shell fish that were returned to the sea.

There were also several car tyres – which could be considered artificial reefs with the life now living on them and also some car batteries which we were unable to lift at the time but we would definitely like to return and remove these.

There were ~20 others doing an amazing job picking up 1000’s of pieces of rubbish caught in and amongst the plants and rocks along the beach. These are mostly small items and it can be quite demoralising as every time you move something – weed, a stick, a stone – you see more rubbish. They managed to collect at least 17 bags of rubbish and even managed to find some cash. Good deeds do pay off!

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We had a lot of fun, got some fresh air and exercise and achieved something good for the local environment. We are looking forward to their next clean up in June and we will be back lending a hand as well. We will let you know the date and we hope to see you there.

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