Volunteer Crews Hit the Beaches for Coastal Cleanup Day : Environment: About 1,300 people pick up unsightly, dangerous trash along the coast and nearby waterways.

Up and down the Ventura County coast, volunteers were busy Saturday morning filling hundreds upon hundreds of large plastic bags with someone else’s trash.

Their mission: to cleanse beaches and inland waterways of unsightly debris that not only mucks up the ocean but is responsible for the deaths of countless marine creatures.

About 1,300 ecology-minded volunteers, young and old, assembled at 27 sites around Ventura County from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday to take part in the 10th annual California Coastal Cleanup Day. They were joined by thousands of others throughout California.

“We clean about 500 miles of (beaches) all told, but we are stretched out from the Oregon border to Baja California,” said Nicole Brier of the California Coastal Commission.

Local efforts were coordinated by Richard Sweet, an analyst with the Ventura County Solid Waste Management Department.

Project sites along the Ventura County coast ranged from Mobil Oil Pier Beach to the north to Leo Carrillo State Beach near the Los Angeles County border. Volunteers also plucked refuse from inland watercourses in Santa Paula, Moorpark and Newbury Park. A group from Friends of the Channel Islands traveled by boat to Anacapa Island.

Sweet said there was plenty of trash for all:

Cigarette butts galore. Paper stuff--lots of it and of all kinds. Metal pull tabs. Plastic six-pack rings and a plastic eyeball. Clothing and shoes. Tires, tables, chairs and a few shopping carts. A lobster trap and a volleyball net.

Just about everything, said Newbury Park resident Carol Parker, who volunteered at Marina Park in Ventura.

“It’s amazing what people don’t consider trash--they just don’t consider littering at all,” she said.

Parker’s husband, Vann, has worked as site captain at Marina Park for the past four years. Vann Parker, a research scientist at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, recruited 20 of his colleagues to help out.

“I enjoy the ocean, and one thing that I try and do is facilitate (cleanup efforts),” he said.

Cliff Wright, 40, is a scientist at Amgen. He traveled to Marina Park from Thousand Oaks with his son, John, 10, and two young friends, Michael and Tim Collinson.

“This is a fun, structured thing for the kids to do,” Wright said.

Besides some spent fireworks and a rifle shell, not all of what the bunch gathered would be considered everyday litter.

“I found some marijuana,” 10-year-old Michael Collinson said. “It was mostly gone,” Michael said of the marijuana cigarette.

At Surfers Point in Ventura--like elsewhere--cigarette butts were by far the most prevalent catch.

“You can stand in one spot and not move and pick up butts all day,” said Dave Herbruck, 45, of Ventura. Herbruck is a member of the Ventura East Optimist Club, which adopts Surfers Point each year for the cleanup day.

Surfers Point site captain Dave Erickson, 39, said he was pleased with the show of community help this year. “Usually, it’s just our club, about 15 members. But this year we had 45 people. That’s encouraging, to see people show up on their own,” he said.

Erickson received help from his 16-year-old daughter, Christie, and her friend, Jessica Huber, 14.

Walking along the rocky shore, as surfers milked what they could from the gentle surf, the duo gathered the usual--bottles, plastic and the like. But Christie also found a rusty, wood-handled knife. She joked of its possible connection to a certain recent crime.

For her part, an initially ambivalent Jessica was glad she tagged along for the morning. “I wasn’t in the mood to wake up at 7, but now I’m glad I came. The surfers and everybody were stopping to thank us.”

Only a couple hundred volunteers had preregistered for this year’s event, Sweet said. However, the workers showed up in force on Saturday, and numbers were similar to last year’s total of 1,343.

The only poor turnout was at Mobil Oil Pier Beach where--besides a Caltrans crew--just one family arrived to collect refuse, Sweet said.

“It was disappointing because that beach is a particularly dirty one,” he said.

In all, about 6,000 pounds of recyclables were collected. Other trash--headed for the area dumps--weighed more than 19,000 pounds.

So is the annual event helping clean things up?

“We are seeing definite improvements,” said Brier of the California Coastal Commission. “The beaches are getting cleaner. The 1993 data shows that California beaches have the lowest percentage of plastics on a national level and the largest six-year decrease in bottles and associate goods.”

Awareness and education are key.

“We still have a lot of work to do inland,” she said. “We need to further educate people about the importance of keeping our inland waterways clean--a storm drain is an express route right back out to the ocean.”

Careless litterers need to realize the threat that refuse poses to marine animals, she said.

“It’s not just ugly--but it kills,” Brier said.

“Trash gets mistaken for food on a constant basis. Plastic food bags can be mistaken for jellyfish. Cigarette butts are eaten by birds. It creates the notion of being full, and the animals end up starving to death.”