Our Daily Ocean: Day 97

Once again we made it to the beach VERY late... this whole end of summer thing is really throwing me for a loop!!  I need to make a mental note to head to the beach 30 minutes earlier than I think I do!!  Check it out... this is what it looked like when we got to the beach!!!  Absolutely no time to spare... we headed right and got a move on doing our 20 minute clean up...

Walking around on Wrightsville Beach last night, something looked different.  There was a noticeable lack of litter.  Turns out that a local church group decided that-- since Labor Day had just passed-- it was important to do a beach clean up at  Wrightsville Beach.  Agreed!  High 5's to them!!! :D  Since they were picking up the majority of "bigger" items... it left us to focus on the "smalls."

During clean ups post Hurricane Irene, we've noticed a drastic increase in plastic caps.  My thinking is that those caps were buried in the sand and when the hurricane moved the sand around on the beach... she uncovered things (such as bottle caps).  Well... last night at the high tide line I saw this bottle cap peeking out from the sand.  Made me wonder how many more are buried...hmmm???  Guess we'll find out if we get another hurricane...

Over the weekend, I got messages from my friends Julie and Ginger.  Julie went to Access 36 with her family and picked up 370 cigarette butts.  Ginger and her husband John adopted Access 18 and in 15 minutes Ginger picked up 406 cigarette butts!!  Those amounts have been added to the community count on the sidebar!  The new Wrightsville Beach community count total is at: 9,617!!

Rewinding: A year ago on September 7, we did our 8th beach clean up!  At the time, the fact that I had 2,291 cigarette butts sitting in my garage was something that was so unbelievable to me.  Now... a year later....we have almost 34,000 cigarette butts.  And all it took was 20 minutes at a time...

20 minutes on September 7, 2011 at Access 19

Litter by weight: 1 lb 6.8 oz
Cigarette butts: 1,633

Total amount of cigarette butts removed from Wrightsville Beach, NC in 97 days: 

33,989