Volunteers Bag 7 Tons of Trash in Beach Sweep

From a distance, the wide, sun-drenched beach at Oxnard Shores looks like something out of a South Seas travel brochure: a pristine stretch of sand where the pounding surf quickly erases a beachcomber’s footprints.

But take a closer look--as Jan Jason and other volunteers did Saturday morning--and you see all the other things that people leave behind, things that don’t disappear with the next wave.

“What I’m getting is fishing line, cigarette butts and dog poop,” Jason said, wielding a garden hoe in one gloved hand and a blue trash bag in the other. “I would like to say something to dog owners, people who smoke and fishermen: Each one of us makes a difference.”

Jason, a grandmother from Ventura, was one of 1,144 volunteers who spent a few hours Saturday removing a summer’s worth of trash from Ventura County’s 55 miles of shoreline.

From La Conchita on the north to Leo Carrillo State Beach on the south, the volunteers wearing straw hats, sun screen and rubber gloves picked up more than seven tons of trash, bit by bit.

“It went very smoothly,” said Kitty Dill, spokeswoman for the Ventura County Regional Sanitation District, which coordinated the effort for the eighth consecutive year.

Fanning out from 28 locations, the volunteers collected 4,010 pounds of recyclable materials and 10,774 pounds of plain old trash, Dill said. The 14,784-pound total was up from last year’s haul of 12,748 pounds, but was considerably less than the 40,000 pounds collected in 1990.

Sycamore Cove, a few miles south of Mugu Rock, was the dirtiest spot this year, Dill said. Volunteers there collected nearly 1,500 pounds of trash, she said.

At Oxnard Shores, many volunteers said the beach seemed cleaner this year than last. Some said the beaches had to be cleaned after last winter’s storms, so there was less junk left for Saturday’s operation.

“People are a lot neater than they used to be,” said Roger Quirk, an Oxnard Shores resident who takes part in the cleanup every year. “Compared to, say, six years ago, it’s a hell of a lot better. People are more self-conscious.”

The annual cleanup gives people an incentive not to litter, Quirk said. “The cleaner you make a place, the more people take care of it.”

But it was obvious Saturday that not everyone had gotten that message. After covering only a few yards, three girls from an Oxnard Brownie troop had collected samples from several major trash groups.

“So far we have pieces of glass, pieces of plastic, bottle caps, pieces of paper, pieces of wood,” said Rebecca Pinon, 7, as she filled out one of the cleanup’s official tally sheets. “I think people should clean up more often and not be lazy.”

“Here’s another one,” shouted her friend, 7-year-old Gina Palomares, as she carefully placed a chunk of wood into the girls’ blue trash bag.

Rebecca’s sister, 6-year-old Elizabeth Pinon, ran up with the jagged remnant of a glass bottle, which went into the aqua-colored bag for trash that could be recycled.

“There’s an awful lot of glass,” said Elizabeth’s mother, Vivian Pinon, who kept reminding the girls not to take off their plastic gloves. She said the cleanup provides the Brownies with a merit badge while teaching them to care about the environment.

Bodine Elias, who supervised the Oxnard Shores effort, said many parents bring their children to the cleanup with the same idea. “A lot of people are trying to instill their kids with a sense of responsibility for the beach,” Elias said.

For many participants, civic virtue was its own reward. “I like any kind of community action,” said Dick Chaiclin. But prizes were awarded to volunteers who found especially unusual discards.

Michael Lemmel, a visitor from Sweden, won a trip to Santa Cruz Island for uncovering a wooden animal trap at the mouth of the Ventura River. Eight-year-old Aimee Allred of Ventura won a night’s stay at a Country Inn for her unusual find: a statue of the Virgin Mary that turned up at the foot of Seaward Avenue.

The tally sheets asked volunteers to identify 81 categories of trash--from bottle caps to metal drums, tires to tampon applicators. The information will be included in the National Marine Debris Database, a project of the nonprofit Center for Marine Conservation aimed at curbing ocean pollution.

With the precision of a military operation, the bags collected at Oxnard Shores were picked up by volunteers from the Pacific Coast 4-by-4 Assn., a group of four-wheel-drive enthusiasts who hauled the bags to dumpsters stationed along the beach.

As he loaded bags onto his Jeep, Dennis Knicklebine of Ventura said he was annoyed that most of the volunteers at Oxnard Shores seemed to be small children or retirees.

“I wish we would see some of the younger kids who pollute the beach out here,” said Knicklebine, 30. “The kids party out here at night but they don’t help pick up.”

Most of the teen-agers and young adults at the beach Saturday seemed more interested in surfing than scavenging for trash. But some took a few minutes to help out, including a surfer who handed Jason some fishing line that had gotten caught in his toes.

As she bent over to pull a matchbook and a chopsticks wrapper from the sand, Jason said she and her beach-going friends are used to picking up after others.

“A lot of us do it on an informal basis,” said Jason, who likes to watch the sea birds that gather at the Santa Clara River estuary. “I’m just a beach person.”