Surfing Soapbox:Laguna beaches making the grade

With the hot weather of this past week and much talk about Laguna Beach becoming a newly crowned “beach buddy,” I wanted to find out just how clean our beaches really are.

This was after running into a longtime Laguna Beach resident who frequently runs along our beaches and had told me just how dirty some of them were. It was time to find out how clean or dirty our beaches really were “” especially in front of the oceanfront hotels.

I started my little beach mission Tuesday at 9 a.m. walking from Pearl Street beach down to Main Beach. I wanted to give each hotel an ample amount of time to clean up in front of its respective areas, and I thought 9?a.m. was more than enough time.

First up was the Surf and Sand hotel, which has someone clean and rake the sand in front of the hotel. The area in front of the hotel for the most part was pretty clean, except for the cigarette butts that appeared to have been thrown out from the balconies above and onto the beach. Grade B.

Next was the Capri Hotel, which in my opinion was the cleanest of all of the hotels. Whoever cleans and rakes their area deserves an A grade.

Sadly, the Vacation Village was by far the dirtiest.

Not only was it not cleaned or raked, it was covered with cigarette butts, Styrofoam and a couple piles of sea weed in or around their area. Grade F.

The Hotel Laguna was also not raked and was at best marginally clean. What got me the most about their area was that it was fenced off with a small chain link marking their so-called territory. Wouldn’t you think that if they go to all that trouble the least they could do for their guests would be to clean up? Grade D.

As for the beaches in between, I was pleasantly surprised at just how clean our beaches were, and that’s including the notoriously unkempt beach known as Thalia Street beach.

Who knew that Laguna Beach really was a beach buddy?

Peace.