World Ocean Day: Cleaning Mermaids
Save the Mermaids, an organization that strives to educate the community about human-sourced ocean pollution, and Channel Island Outfitters teamed up and hosted a beach clean up followed by a free stand up paddle boarding and an ocean day bash at the Endless Café in the Santa Barbara Harbor. Around 25 people showed up on this, as always, beautiful Santa Barbara afternoon to take part and clean up the Leadbetter Beach. People were happy and excited to be a part of this sunny event for a good cause. Everyone gave their best to make sure the beach got cleaned up from plastic waste, cigarette butts, and other trash.
Kaia Stachel-Zambryski, executive director of Save the Mermaids, says that today is really exciting because we are not only letting people come and clean up the beach but we are also giving back to them by going out stand up paddle boarding afterwards.
“Isn’t it nice to walk up and down the beach, I don’t mind doing this at all.” – Corinna Bernasko, one of all the volunteers of the day. She also thinks that the event was well organized. “It is not too long and afterwards we get to paddle board”, she describes with a smile on her face.
Dressed in a bra made out of seashells, Emma Sirena gave her thoughts on the event: “We are showing our love to the ocean today by cleaning the beaches and taking everyone out for a fun paddle.”
Sirena tells me that most of the trash we find is single used items such as cups and balloons. “Someone uses it once and then they throw it away, and then it haunts the oceans and the beaches for up to a thousand years which is how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade.”
After about an hour of picking up trash the crew went out on a paddleboard excursion around the harbor. Staff from the Channel Island Outfitters were there to help out with equipment and a quick how-to-paddleboard lesson before they all went out and enjoyed the sun and the ocean.
For more information about the Mermaids check out: www.savethemermaids.org
