Pondering Refuse (2/12/13)

I figure you may be just about done hearing about our day to day wanderings in paradise.  Granted, I’m sure that any account of soft sand and gentle breezes is welcome amidst the usual more wintery weather experienced in the bulk of the country.  I do, however, also know that reading a diary can become tedious after a while, no matter the setting.

So as we were on a walk to the ocean side bluffs of Black Point Settlement yesterday, I took to pondering the more general impressions I’ve had of the Bahamas and our experience here – beginning with TRASH.  Cruising makes the most basic activities of daily life seem larger, more in our faces.  One of the most striking things I’m met with on a daily basis here is how much refuse we as human beings contribute to our environment. 

On our escape from the windy day onboard yesterday, we decided to find the inland lake showing on the charts of Great Guana Key on which Black Point Settlement sits.  The lake could be accessed from a winding settlement road or along the ocean coast on what was noted to be a “path” (I’ll leave that story for another time!).

The ocean beaches here are rough.  The Exuma chain sits on the easternmost edge of a large underwater desert with New Providence and Nassau on the northeast corner of the mass and Great Exuma Island and Georgetown on the southern border.  The island chain contains hundreds of little mostly uninhabited islands with the shallow and far reaching Exuma Bank to the west and the deeper ocean-like waters of the Exuma Sound to the East.

It bears noting that with such limited settlement, the services are limited as well.  Finding a place to remove our bag of trash from the boat becomes an “issue”, many times requiring a hefty sum to add your bag to the bin.  This element in itself makes every piece of trash collected onboard more of an entity, something to be taken note of and preferably reduced whenever possible.

But that’s not really the trash I’ve been most affected by.  In walking the ocean beaches, with their exposure to the deeper waters and crashing waves of the eastern coast’s Exuma sound, we find endless expanses of TRASH.  From soles of shoes to broken buckets.  Hollowed out TV’s to endless bottle caps.  The obvious biggest contributor is anything plastic.

We see all of this “up close and personal” because these beaches are the best for finding the elusive sea beans that every cruiser grows to love collecting.  To find them requires slow prodding on the edges of anything brought up by the higher tide – mostly seaweed and, you guessed it, trash. 

In our most recent wanderings, the volume of the washed up refuse was simply overwhelming.  On one beach that required scaling a large cliff and back down the other side, we found more trash than human effort could affect.  Shockingly, amidst all of the ground up plastic-everything, we found countless sea beans, gorgeous shells and delicate sea creature skeletons. 

For hours we wandered this beach torn between the sadness over what we as a race are doing to our oceans and what, in turn, the oceans offer up to us as treasures.  With initial intentions of doing ANYTHING to try to make a difference and then realizing it was just too big to change, we finally found our way back to the boat with our collection of shells and treasures.

We’ve been to beaches before and after this here that have proved the same results.  And now every time I open a can or wrap something in saran or grab a Ziploc bag, I think about the beaches.  And I’m changing.   It’s a small but simple thing I can do to think more about what I contribute to this mess we call waste – and even if my part is small, it already feels good to think maybe we CAN make a difference!