14 November 1997, Friday
Saint Kitts, West Indies
A beautiful sunrise with clouds far out on the horizon; it’s a new beach again today. The tide is out, and the sand down to the water’s edge is wide and smooth. Yesterday it was just a narrow strip of sand with steep ridges. It’s amazing to me how much the shoreline can change in just hours. For several days now the beach has looked different each morning. On Monday evening for example, it was smooth, flat, and unusually clean. Early Tuesday, just hours later, we were out walking in a fresh morning breeze to discover literally bails of fresh cut sea grass cast up on the shore during the night. There had been no local storms, but something had caused this crop of chopped green hay-like substance to show up within hours. I’ve never seen anything like this stuff before, it looks more like something we might enjoy at table than something washed up on the beach.
Coming from the U.S. West Coast we’re not used to seeing this kind of sea growth. More familiar to us are the heavy stalk and leaves of greasy-looking kelp. When a bulk of kelp, a slippery substance, washes up on the beach it can be pretty nasty. But here, the predominant growth looks like the new clippings made by a lawn mower while the grass is still wet. Soon now, an army of crabs will make short work of this harvest.
Looking out on the water we can see large quantities of cut sea grass on its way in. I gather that rough seas somewhere to the east basically harvest the stuff and send it floating on its way.
Leeward Cove, in conjunction with its neighbors Sand & Sea, Island Paradise, and the Sea Lofts, have come together and hired a tractor and crew to clean the beach early each morning while this greenery assaults the beach. It really is a necessity, not because of the seaweed, which at least is all-natural material, but because of all the trash that floats up each night along with it. It is a tragedy to see the quantity of garbage floating in the oceans these days. Most of the junk that makes it to shore is plastic. Within the space of 24 hours, we can expect to see enough trash wash up on a mile of beach to fill half the bed of a pickup truck. After a storm the situation is much, much worse. And now with all the sea grass floating in, it is hard for these guys to keep up with the onslaught.
A few years ago, Maureen and I spent ten days on an island just off the coast of Belize called Ambergris Cay. It marks the extreme southern end of the second largest barrier reef in the world. (The world’s largest barrier reef is off the coast of Australia and renowned as the “Great Barrier Reef.”) Cozumel, Mexico, is an island off the eastern coast of the Yucatan just below Cancun. It caps the top end of the barrier reef running north from Belize. We have been traveling the Caribbean coast of Mexico and Belize for at least thirty years and have noted the growing pollution problem slamming all the beaches.
One memorable day as we walked along a deserted beach on Ambergris Cay we stepped through literally tons of bags, bottles, medical materials, fishing nets, and anything and everything synthetic. Occasionally we’d see a glass bottle, but 95% of the stuff was plastic. The quantities of the trash were so overwhelming that at first we thought the place was a local dump. Eventually we came to realize that the eastern seaboard of everything in the Caribbean was constantly inundated with floating trash driven by the ever-present movement of the waves in a westerly direction. What we had come upon was simply a beach that no one had bothered to clean.
So, here we are, living half of each year on the eastern seaboard of a Caribbean island. An amazing amount of trash drifts in from ships at sea, local pleasure boats, cruising yachts, and from other islands whose residents simply jettison their trash off their leeward shore and allow it to drift away to somewhere else. Plastic, glass and synthetic fibers are the major problems, and it is a good deal more distressing that one would like to believe.
The nearby island of Antigua, for example, is just forty miles east of us. The locals on the west side of the island still throw their trash in the ocean. The winds and waves sink the heavy items and the paper and biodegradable rubbish breakdown fairly quickly, but lots of the junk from Antigua comes straight to St Kitts. Milk jugs, soda bottles, bleach bottles, plastic trash bags and other plastic products, cannot be recycled by the ocean. To make matters worse this stuff all floats. The problem is not going to improve until the local people of all the islands develop an understanding of just what they’re doing and take personal responsibility for the health and beauty of their neighboring countries.
Ships are a quandary. Just about every ship in the world dumps its waste overboard when past the twelve-mile limit of any nation’s shore. Now, that’s not all bad because the sea can and does recycle huge amounts of trash. But the sea cannot deal with plastic.
About 10:00 this morning Maureen and I walked to a secluded part of the beach at Frigate Bay where the waves were not quite so large. She parked herself in the shade of a nearby sand dune, and I donned my neon green mask, snorkel, and fins, and swam out and around the end of an ancient volcanic flow. Colorful fish were everywhere, and most showed no fear of me. As I paddled about studying the corral structures and the abundant sea life, I realized a fairly large barracuda was close by following my every move with keen interest. Each time I moved to face him, he would move to my side, whereupon I would turn some more and then so would he. Swimming in place I made three full turns watching him make three full turns watching me. Pretty weird sensation that.
Now once upon a time, when I was much, much, younger, (about fourteen), I used to work on offshore commercial fishing boats during the summer months. Catching barracudas, or scooters as we called them, was a big deal and I’ve landed lots of them, but boy can they be dangerous. The head is very long compared to the body, and it’s comprised primarily of wicked-looking teeth. The variety here are much larger and meaner looking than the typically 3 feet long scooters we regularly caught in the Pacific. It is an efficient killer with apparently no fear; a prehistoric throwback that has a positively evil look about it. Barracuda are said to be the fastest thing in the sea, evidently faster than killer whales, dolphin, shark, or even sail fish. And barracuda have an attitude. A barracuda can move in very fast and take a bite out of almost anything it chooses.
I decided to scare it away and made a clumsy effort at charging this aggressive hunter, but the scooter simply held its distance and moved to the side. About this time a surface wave landed a large piece of floating plastic on my back. It frightened me badly as I was faced with a large barracuda staring me down. I decided it was time to head to shore. All in all, it was strange, somewhat frightening, and a little bit surreal.
There is great beauty out there in the oceans, frequently just a few feet below the surface, but the trash problem is impacting that beauty and somehow, we’ve got to get it under control.