So now down to the ugly side of it all as was previously promised. Garbage, most of which is plastic. This picture is of a beach on the sound side of the Exumas by Oven Rock. It does not portray all that was on this small beach as well that was in the scrub surrounding the beach. Bread crates, packing material, fish nets-lots of fish nets, fishing floats, flip flops, barrettes, buckets, milk jugs, plastic baggies, plastic bottles, plastic grocery bags, pipes, tubing, cans, plastic plates and utensils, one could go on & on. If that wasn’t disturbing enough as you sifted thru the sand there were small, smaller and tiny pieces of plastic. The sign below In the Exuma Cays Land & Sea Park states that ingesting plastic garbage killed the 52 ft sperm whale. Very poignant.

And this from the Olive Ridley Project out of the UK and focusing on the Indian Ocean.

And this news link from a study published in the journal Environment International.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/microplastics-found-in-human-blood-for-first-time

And this by no means is exclusive to the Bahamas, it is rampant around the world and getting worse. Only if you live under a rock have you not heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is roughly 620,000 square miles or about the size of Texas. About 4-14 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year and it makes up 80% of all marine debris. And as plastic degrades into smaller pieces of microplastics they begin to sink into the deep-sea sediment. A study done in 2014 found that about 4 billion microscopic plastic fibers could be littering each square mile of deep-sea sediment.

In our sailing journey we have seen plastic & garbage in the water just about each & every day. The most prevalent? Pieces of fishing nets, plastic bottles and Mylar or latex party balloons w/strings. The nets and balloons can be deadly as they entangle wildlife in them and the mylar may cause electrical shorts when they come in contact w/power lines. A master’s student @ the University of Michigan is working on calling attention to problems that balloons cause primarily in the Great Lakes. On our sail from Ft Pierce to St Augustine, FL we saw at least 6 balloons in the water along w/other garbage.

So what can be done about it? There are organizations that are creating ways or huge machines to ‘eat’ the plastic in the oceans or small machines to recycle them into jewelry or art, building businesses for small island nations and creating income. This is unfortunately after the fact and will not be able to keep up w/the amount of plastic going into rivers, lakes and oceans. It all begins w/us my friends. We HAVE to wean ourselves away from single use plastics, period! Seems like a no brainer but it’s a lot harder than one thinks. D & I finally got it down to ask for ‘no straw please’ or ‘no cover please’ for our drinks or coffee. If we forget to bring our canvas bags to the store for groceries we go back and get them versus getting plastic bags. We drink our water out of reusable metal containers versus plastic bottles. We take mesh bags to get produce in. We are far from perfect but are trying to make a conscious decision every time we buy, use, need something. If everyone would give this a go it might make a beginning dent in the outflow of plastics.

Ramping it up a notch one can contact manufacturing companies, restaurants, grocery stores, urging them to focus on not making, using or purchasing products packaged in plastic.

Or take to social media questioning the reasoning for massive quantities of garbage. This is something we have done recently. There is a certain establishment in Georgetown that is very popular. We were walking down the beach from this establishment and noticed a HUGE, and I mean HUGE pile of garbage. A mountain of garbage bags, beginning to tear open; an equally large pile of glass beer bottles, the lower ones breaking under the total weight of the pile; all located less than 200ft from the water. We were appalled! D lurking as me (he does this to follow the Tartan 4400 group sharing advice, etc) on Facebook asked the question “Does anyone know what is up w/the pile of garbage behind this place?” An unsatisfactory response led him to state “us cruisers are causing this pile”. OMG, one would have thought we drove a dagger into the heart of every cruiser. “We don’t dump our garbage there, we know better”, “It’s the places fault, that’s what they do” and some other dicier ones. Ok then, my dander was up and I totally chose the high road in the responses; stating that no insinuation was made that cruisers were dumping their garbage there BUT if one patronized the place one WAS contributing to the pile of garbage. And it just went on. For those of you who know me relatively well you know that I am NOT a confrontational person, generally avoiding it at all cost; a huge fault of mine. But this one got me and I was actually proud of myself & my responses.

So PLEASE everyone, pick 1-3 things to work on to reduce this problem.

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