I joined the Living Ocean’s Marine Debris cleanup July 29-Aug 8 slated for Cox and Lanz Islands. These two islands are 10 km off the north tip of Vancouver Island and part of Cape Scott Provincial Park.
Living Oceans is an environmental society with campaigns on the ocean’s role in providing food, jobs and security, protecting wild salmon and marine ecosystems from open net-cage salmon farming, informing responsible ocean policy, ensuring a sustainable fishery, and sustainable seafood and tackling ocean acidification.
Living Oceans has conducted its Clean the Coast marine debris removal program for a decade. Its mandate is the north end of Vancouver Island extending around Cape Scott up to San Josef Bay. Most years have conducted a clean concentrating on the Sea Otter Cove / Lowie Bay / Helen Islands and San Josef Bay area. In the past support was provided by Karen Wirsten’s sailboat. Up to 2024, all people participating were volunteers – and usually older. I was the only volunteer of the six in our group; the other five received $15-30/hour. I was very impressed with the hard work ethic of my fellow workers. They all earned their wages.
Seabird life used to abound on Cox because of raccoon and mink, the descendants of a 1930s attempt to establish a fur-ranching business on the Island. The raccoons were coloured chocolate brown, unlike their urban cousins. Also unlike their urban cousins, they took no interest in our food stores! The beautiful bay on which we were camped was also home to sea otters and seals,
A Zoom meeting was held for information. Brent from Victoria and Dennis from Port Coquitlam drove with me to Port Hardy (3 hours). We met at the North Coast Backpackers Hostel in Port Hardy. We joined Blue from points unknown, Warren from East Vancouver, and Santih from Lesqueti.
We had boat support from Jason Rose in his Hurricane 749, an aluminum-hulled shallow-draft vessel and a smaller zodiac. He was able to move the crew around and was able to get into narrow pocket beaches.
Day 1 July 30. We drove the 75 km (2 hours) on logging roads past Holburg to the helicopter staging area. The plan was to fly to Cox Island but the ceiling was too low and the plans were changed to Sea Otter Cove. We camped on the north shore where a rough toilet has been for a few years.
Day 2 July 31. Lowie Bay. 1 1/2 hour hike across the headland from the east end of Sea Otter Cove. 2 super sacs
Day 3 Aug 1. San Josef Bay. Boated to the south shore of Sea Otter Cove and took the short trail to San Josef Bay. We also cleaned the south shore of Sea Otter Cove.
Day 4 Aug 2. Helen Islands. Some boated to outer Helen Island in the evening.
Day 5 Aug 3. Fly to Cox Island. We flew to a beach on the north shore of Cox Island. 8 supers sacs and 4 buoy strings were moved to our camping beach. The camp was on a great beach on the south shore of Cox – brown, clean sand with no sand fleas and great tent sites among the logs. Brent made a wonderful kitchen with a big counter and a series of shelves for storage. We had a bench, and two “sofas”, one a Thule bumper cover and the other gym mats.
Day 6. Aug 4. Cleaned our camping beach.
Day 7 Sunday Aug 5. Morning off, cleaned the home camping beach.
Day 8. Aug 6. Cleaned beaches on either side of our camping beach. The west beach had 10 super sacs and 6 buoy strings, 5 tires and 2 barrels. Five of the super sacs were landfill, mostly styrofoam. The east beach had 5 super sacs and 3 buoy strings.
Day 9, Aug 7. We waited for the helicopter but Vancouver Island was completely fogged in from Cape Scott to Tofino. We eventually took Jason’s big boat 100 km to Port Alice, and hired a van to return to Port Hardy. Three of us drove 4 hours return to pick up the vehicles from the helicopter site on the other side of Holburg.
In the end, we used all of the 54 super sacs, all the high-test blue rope and all the food and water. For breakfast, we had rehydrated green beans fried with salami and ham.
Day 10 Aug 8. We drove home leaving Port Hardy at 6 am.
Cleaning beaches requires IKEA bags that seem made for the job with two lengths of straps and indestructable construction. The Victorinox serrated knife ($10) is the only reliable thing I found to cut rope. They never go dull. Serrated saws are ok for rope but dangerous and not as efficient as Victorinox knife. They are most useful to saw plastic containers.
All debris was brought to a common point picked for practicality (sometimes close to large items that couldn’t be moved). Two caches may be needed on long beaches. An area above the highest tide line with helicopter longline access is picked. The cache needs to be secured to a tree or logs.
Recyclable material: foam floats (without a plastic core), oyster baskets and crab pots, hard plastic, hard plastic buoys, HDPE pipe, netting, rope, beverage bottles, barrels, white Styrofoam, tires with Styrofoam.
Non-recyclable material: dirty Styrofoam, glass and fibreglass, degraded plastic bottles, foam floats with a plastic core, pipe and tubing – PVC and ABS, lighters, tennis balls, hazardous items, and metal.
Sorting. All debris had to be sorted at each beach. Generally, four super sacks were used – one each for PET, mixed hard plastic, rope and net, and landfill. However, the quantity varied with the beach and smaller, clear plastic bags were used for debris that was insufficient in volume to fill a supersack (for example the beaches on Cox had little PET and there was little white Styrofoam). Hard plastic buoys were strung using salvaged rope.
Probable container spill debris was kept separate and photographed with a sign indicating the location. They were sorted into the appropriate recycling or landfill stream and bagged with everything else. The common Zim Kingston debris we found were plastic unicorns, multicoloured water guns, clogs, heavy rubber boots, Thule bumper covers (of very high quality). Other lucky groups have found YETI coolers.
I found one hockey glove from a 1990 spill that was extremely degraded. These gloves were common on my earliest beach cleans when the goal was to find a right and left of the same size.
The super sacs were closed and tied with a tether that provided easy lifting access.
Living Oceans Society
Karen Wristan Executive director and organizer of the debris cleanup
Suite #7 – 650 Clyde Avenue, West Vancouver, BC V7T 1E2
Phone: 604-696-5044
Email: info@livingoceans.org
Clean Coast, Clean Waters
In 2023, 17 coastal marine debris cleanup projects received $8M in provincial funding, as part of the Clean Coast, Clean Waters (CCCW) initiative. Of the 17 BC projects, seven are Indigenous-led. 1,900 km of shoreline, at least 31 derelict vessels and six derelict aquaculture sites are included in the project.
Ten Island projects received $4.4M—over half of the province’s funding:
Ocean Legacy Foundation (OLF), a non-profit that works to remove plastic from Island beaches and marine ecosystems – $1M,
Quatsino First Nation (Coal Harbour) – $750K
Living Ocean Society Cape Scott – $571K.
Emerald Sea Protection Society discarded fishing gear near Bamfield. – $300K
Rugged Coast Research Society Campbell River – $465K
Since the CCCW initiative began four years ago, over 2,100 tonnes of marine debris has been removed from more than 6,400 km of shoreline and 215 derelict boats have been removed. It also helped to create 2,400 jobs and is expected to add another 639 this year.
Clear the Coast 2024 September
It’s truly amazing what we can accomplish with teamwork and adequate funding. We don’t have the final numbers on this year’s marine debris cleanup yet and won’t have for some time, but it would appear that Living Oceans and partners brought in nearly 40 tonnes of plastic marine debris this year—much of it from the Scott Islands, a hotspot of biodiversity and therefore also of risk for plastic entanglement and consumption.
Partnering with Quatsino and Tlatlasikwala First Nations, Lonepaddle Conservationists Society and Rugged Coast Research Society, we applied to the Province’s Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative Fund with a project focused on the Scott Islands, but also including the Cape Scott Trail and the northwest coast’s water-access-only beaches that we’ve cleaned for the past 10 years.
The difference we’ve made with that decade of work (funded by all of you, thank you very much!) was starkly apparent: on the beaches we clean annually, we picked up between 2-4 of cubic metres of debris. On Lanz Island, which has never been cleaned before, Rugged Coast filled 240 supersacks (about 1.5 cubic metres apiece). Cox Island, which we’ve cleaned in day-trips a few times over the years, yielded about 150 cubic metres plus 25 barrels, 50 large floats, 3 large pallets and a couple of dozen tires.
There were some impressive moments on this trip, but the one that I’ll never forget is the sight of the team working together on Cox Island to roll a massive bundle of hawser and heavy electrical cable out of a streambed. It had to weigh at least 700 lb, soaking wet and full of mud. The hawser alone was so large and heavy that to bag it, we had to cut it into pieces and leave it in the sun to dry before lifting it into several lift bags. Everyone was covered in mud, soaked and elated!
Picking up the debris and bagging it was challenging enough, but transporting it to landfill/recycling was fraught. We realized early in the Lanz cleanup that there was far too much debris to take out by helicopter alone—we needed a barge. We organized helicopters, tug, barge and trucking for September 8-9, only to find the weather closing in before we’d lifted a quarter of the debris.
The whole operation had to be reorganized for September 14-15, with the threat of a major storm on the horizon. We booked three helicopters, determined to get the job done. The night before it was all to happen, we found ourselves 2 helicopters down: one pilot concerned about weather and one machine with mechanical issues. Our hats are off to pilot Wylie at Kestrel Helicopters, whose impressive longlining skills and efficiency enabled him to load the remaining 300-odd bags, all while moving our ground crew about from cache to cache!
David Jensen (Lonepaddle) worked with us throughout the season, right through until the last bag was sorted, weighed and left at the marine debris recycling depot. His paddleboard expertise allowed him to access beaches that we can’t get to by boat. He single-handedly cleaned the pocket beaches from Cape Russell to Cape Scott, as well as several more on Cox Island.
