May was a busy month for us, with the weekend of 9th – 11thMay turning out to be the biggest beach cleaning event we have ever organised on the island – the Bracadale Beach Blitz! With the help of many volunteers and partner organisations, and especially the Scottish Coastal Clean Up project and their boat, The Curlew, we removed at least 5 tonnes of litter from 7 of the beaches around Loch Bracadale. The weather was still too rough to use the boat on the10th, so we concentrated on cleaning as much as we could over the first two days, and collecting it all up to two skips on the Sunday. Sadly the weather also prevented us being able to access the island beaches, so these remain a further exercise under better conditions in the future.
One of the best things about this exercise was that we were also able to send a significant amount of hard plastic and netting away for recycling – many thanks to Neil Hembrow of the Ocean Recovery Project of Keep Britain Tidy for this and Vicki Last from the Scottish Islands Federation for coordinating the uplift. Representatives of the recycling company, MYGroup, also came to see first-hand where we recover this material from. As previously, we also have to thank TheHighland Council for providing us with skips, and to MOWI for access to their skip at Portnalong, as well as help with handling the boat there, and the removal of a significant amount of feed pipe from Ose Point.
On the Friday afternoon we also held a drop in event at the former Struan School, where Rebecca from Shore to Floor displayed and demonstrated mat making from recovered rope, and SMASS displayed marine plastic recovered from dead cetaceans, amongst other things. Thanks also to D J Morrison for boat support on the Sunday, and James MacQueen(Building Contractors) for builders’ bags – essential to move this amount of debris!
Thanks also to the guys at Eynort for removing another 940kgs of litter on 3rdMay, and contributing more towards the recycling collection, and Skye Tidy Tidelines for adding a whopping 1.72 tonnes to our total debris removed to date for the year! This bring the amount removed so far this year to nearly 11 tonnes!