Homer Alaska - Opinion

As I've written before, I'm a little bit nuts about beaches. Except for the first two years of my life, I've always lived near the ocean. Now that I live in Homer, the beach has become a daily part of my life — even when it's iced over in darkest December.

It only seems natural that I'd be a little bit nuts about CoastWalk, too. This week, the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies starts its 26th annual Kachemak Bay beach cleanup and monitoring. All over the bay, volunteers will walk beaches, picking up trash, counting birds and animals, and monitoring coastal changes.

I can't remember when I started volunteering for CoastWalk, but I think it must have been a few years after I moved to Homer in 1994. I'd discovered Diamond Creek Beach, the section of coast accessible by an old subdivision road and a trail near Diamond Ridge Road. Like Hawaiian secret beaches, Diamond Creek takes some effort to get to. Even on the hottest summer days, you rarely see more than a dozen people on the beach. It's a gem worth discovering and exploring.

So when one year I volunteered for CoastWalk and saw that a section of Diamond Creek beach hadn't been signed up for, I grabbed at the chance. For more than 10 years now I've walked Unit 2, about 2 miles of beach south of Diamond Creek to a point of land near a seal haul out. On one weekend day each September, I load up my day pack with binoculars, notebook, log forms, bird book, snacks and a supply of big, tough plastic bags. Although I enjoy the citizen science, particularly the birding, what I really like about CoastWalk is picking up marine debris.

If I'm a little bit nuts about CoastWalk, I'm certifiably crazy about marine debris. I see cleaning up marine debris as a year-round mission. Whenever and wherever I walk beaches, I take along a trash bag and pick up icky, yucky junk that doesn't belong on the beach.

You name it, I've found it. Plastic pop bottles, cigarette butts, lighters, shotgun shells, buoys, nets, rope, tampon inserters, tennis shoes, oil jugs, toys and thousands of pieces of unknown plastic — I've hauled bulging bags of the stuff off the beach.

The weirdest dang thing I ever found was a plastic box of cremated human remains. And yes, I called the cops on that one. The saddest debris I found was a survival suit collar from a fishermen lost at sea. That one went to the Coast Guard.

One CoastWalk I found a jacket with a Salt Lake City tourist's name and phone number in it. I called him up and found out his jacket had fallen overboard in Resurrection Bay two months earlier. I washed the jacket and mailed it back to him. I figured it would make a good story.

That's what I like about marine debris: it often tells a story. I have found plastic bottles in different languages and alphabets — Russian, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German and Spanish. Sometimes I find bottles filled with cigarette butts. I imagine sailors passing through the Aleutian Islands, smoking their way through a long watch.

I find hats all the time, some poor fisherman's lucky hat, no doubt, blown overboard. Hey, if you write your name in it, I'll send it back to you. Once I found a Homer Yacht Club hat. My sister and her family had gone sailing with her friend Tim, and when she came back and I saw her later, she mentioned how upset Tim was he'd lost his hat. "Here you go," I told her, handing her Tim's hat.

I'll pick up beach trash anywhere. My wife took a photo of me on the Isle of Aran, Scotland, holding a feed bag of trash I'd picked up on the beach there. One summer I took 10 days off for a marine debris cleanup at Gore Point with Gulf of Alaska Keeper and CACS. On a recent trip to Florida, on my morning beach walks I'd take along a bag and fill it up.

Sometimes I'll find odd marine debris, like the same brand of girl's ugly sandal, six rights and nine lefts, in sizes 4 through 11. Whenever I find two of something that doesn't belong on a beach, I suspect I've come across a container spill, like the First Years Floatees, the plastic ducks that washed ashore all over the Pacific Ocean coast in the 1990s. I'm an official recorder of odd objects and correspondent for oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer's newsletter, "Beachcomber's Alert."

A while back I started taking random bits of marine debris and turning it into art. One year I did a show for the Homer Council on the Arts, "What the Sea Gives Back," various art works made entirely of marine debris. I especially like to make masks, faces made of scraps of plastic — a jug top for a face, rope for hair and bottle tops for eyes. Each year I make a mask from what I find on Unit 2, and I'm never lacking for material.

All of this junk gets dutifully recorded during CoastWalk, so marine debris experts can better figure out where it comes from. If it's recyclable, I save it. If it has artistic possibilities, I use it. If it can be restored, I wear it. Amidst all the trash I sometimes find treasure — a Japanese glass float, an old cedar net buoy or an oak barrel stave.

Walking the same beach each year, I see how it changes. Years ago Diamond Creek had piles of jackstraw driftwood logs, but that has washed away. Last summer the seafloor literally rose up in that uplift.

It used to be rafts of marine debris would wash up, but the coastal currents seem to have shifted. I know a huge garbage patch of debris swirls around out there in the north Pacific that will kick off junk with the right storm pattern. We've just been lucky lately and the beaches seem cleaner.

Or maybe, just maybe, all those volunteer hours have paid off. Maybe increased awareness of marine debris has made all of us work harder to clean it up. Maybe the thousand footsteps I and other volunteers have walked, the thousands of bags we've hauled off, have made a difference.

For me, though, I'll be there, patrolling the beaches, ever vigilant and alert, picking up marine debris — and having the time of my life doing it.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.