This last weekend PACK members sacrificed a day of fishing to pick up trash. No! The courts didn’t make us do it and it was not part of a community service sentence. Several members spent the morning volunteering their time, muscles, and boats for TRASH BASH 2008. We all joined Scenic Galveston, the Nature Conservancy, the Galveston County Master Naturalists plus a dozen Sea Aggies from TAMU Galveston and other volunteers numbering 126 in cleaning up the shores of Swan Lake. Dick McGonigle, Lisa Bell, Jack Klinger, Gus Bandemer, Henry Criss, Adrian Ramos and soon to be PACK member be Tom Garcia all gathered boatloads of trash all morning. Our kayaks were used to access shoreline not easily accessed by land.
Swan Lake is the body of water directly to the southeast of the base of Texas City Dike and north of Virginia Point. Dick, Lisa, Gus and Jack provided floating trash barges to which volunteer trash-picker-uppers in kayaks ferried full trash bags bungied to their kayaks. The kayaks were used to access shores that were not easily accessed via land. Henry, Adrian and Tom were with the kayak teams. The shore based teams along with the kayak teams gathered literally hundreds of pounds of garbage that made its way via wind and surf to the shores of Swan Lake. Tires, crab traps, busted ropes, soccer balls, flip flops, hundreds of plastic water bottles, busted buoys and styrofoam were collected – no one knows if the littering was on purpose or not – but a little carelessness by a lot of people for a long time creates a huge mess of garbage in our bays, lakes and bayous. A few hours of hard work can erase a years worth of garbage – I urge all PACK members to get involved with an organization that supports the preservation and conservation of the resources that make our weekends fun.
Adrian Ramos
2008 PACK President
 
 
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