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The Family of Eco-Activists Cleaning Cornish Waters

amycolman

The Founding Family of Clean Ocean Sailing. Image: Jake Husband.

In the heart of West Cornwall, down winding country roads and potholed tracks, lies Constantine Quay boatyard alongside the Helford River in Gweek. Within this boatyard, there are some 5 families all living amongst one particularly remarkable one, the Clean Ocean Sailing family. All aboard the 114-year-old sailboat, The Annette, housing both an extraordinary family and their big dreams of cleaning the Cornish coast and its waterways.


Steve Green and Monika Hertlova are environmental activists spearheading an initiative to protect the waters of Cornwall and beyond. As the founders of Clean Ocean Sailing (COS), they work to not only scour the waterways for the plastic waste polluting our waters, sort and send the waste to appropriate recycling plants, but to also hold the distributors or makers of said waste accountable for it polluting the shores and oceans.


Having spent some time with them upon COS HQ, The Annette, their 1908 gaff rigged schooner, and having taken a morning clean-up around the river Fal with the Clean Ocean Sailing fleet of smaller vessels, I have learnt not only about how this family live but also how they operate as a charity and initiative.


If anyone had hesitations on whether multi-tasking a busy life alongside caring for the planet was a possible feat, then I would encourage them to observe Steve and Monika at work; one second, they are dedicated and concerned parents to their 3-year-old son, Simon and fearless Labrador Rosie and the next, committed eco-activists organising and pioneering projects and escapades to rescue the shorelines and waters of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. For this family, balancing these responsibilities is an everyday occurrence, but to any outsider of this lifestyle, this is a family of eco-superheroes.

But the Clean Ocean Sailing family is not limited to these three humans and canine living on an extremely old boat in Cornwall, the family spans the whole county and beyond. From researchers to activists, recycling experts and the local village cafe, these are the individuals and organisations that put the fuel into this family, literally and not so. Donations of goods, time and money are the only way that this collective and initiative can continue their work and sustain their altruistic lifestyle. So, every minute, every pint and every penny that can go toward them is always returned with a bucket full of gratitude a substantial feeling of gratification.


Spending time with this collection of humans who are all connected by one common goal was an extremely motivational experience. When surrounded by people that are driven to heal the damage humans inflict upon the oceans it is difficult to not be caught up in the tidal wave of activism that follows this collective around like a shadow.

The network of contributors to this lifestyle is not limited to just humans, it extends its way out to the fleet of transport that enables the team to reach the most remote shores and coves harbouring the hard-to-reach plastics polluting the oceans. The Annette is only the tip of the vast iceberg of their radical means of transport. Amongst them is also the 50-year-old Volkswagen Camper called Cecil, assisting with hauling huge loads of collected waste with the crane that is fitted to his roof and running off used vegetable oil from the Gweek boatyard cafe just across the river. This questionably roadworthy vehicle is not only a token of the family's dedication to minimising their output of carbon dioxide, but also a symbol and vehicular backbone of the initiative.


Cecil usually accompanies the team for the tougher jobs, such as the uprooting of a huge hawser half buried at the shoreline, or for the general moving about of the huge sacks of collected waste. These such missions are usually sparked by a notification from the network of connections across the county of waste to retrieve from a particularly shoddy shoreline or large beached deposit. At the same time as being another narrowly avoided heap lurching back into the ocean once the tide approaches, it's another declaration of the importance of their work and reminder of the ever-present necessity of such work.


The mission however, couldn’t be realised without one vital member and driving force behind the COS team, Steve Green. He is certainly a man who lives an impossible number of lives all at the same time, fast becoming evident within my first 10 minutes of meeting him. Located beneath a locals Ford Transit van was not the first impression I expected to have of Steve, however it was exemplary of his consistently occupied life. A jack-of-all-trades by job title and lifestyle, not only does he go by CEO of COS, navigator, engineer, sailor, yacht master, saver of the planet, destroyer of all things single-use and dedicated environmental activist but also caring father and overall, very decent human-being.


Steve and Rosie aboard The Annette. Image: Jake Husband.

Having said all of this, a detail that truly needs to be appreciated about Steve and his family is the unfaltering dedication that they have to this lifestyle and mission. This is not only proved by their raising of Simon and other children on board an arguably small and unconventional floating home, or the everyday effort of caring for the waterways in ways that not many have the motivation or ambition to do. But that their home, their days and every element of their lives overlaps with the Clean Ocean Sailing initiative. By virtue of there being no line drawn between the lives of the family and the mission means that the family share their lives equally with their ambitions, a truly inspiring sacrifice to make.

A week in the life of the team brings about hours of time dedicated to collecting, sorting, and recording heaps of plastic waste, and redirecting this waste to recycling plants that the team regularly work with and trust. When doing this work it becomes irrefutably difficult to not consider every single possession they have or item that they purchase’s impact on the environment. When so directly exposed to the reality of the end of the lives of thousands of products consumed by the population of the UK and its fishing industries, from toys to food and fishing nets to packaging, it strays from a secondary consideration and inevitably parks itself at the forefront of their opinions on consumerist attitudes.


Much of the waste that the initiative fetches from the waters, goes to Rob Thompson at Odyssey Innovation, an organisation that works to recycle marine plastic waste into kayaks, to sell and use to collect even more plastic waste. The project utilises a circular economy business model to counteract the marine plastic waste issue in the ocean and to encourage a change in the way that marine plastic is viewed, from waste to resource.


Unsurprisingly, Steve and his family also have a preference toward repairing, reusing, and repurposing their belongings when their condition falters. This can be assumed to be partly down to their sustainable approach to consumerism but also a resistance to surrendering precious resources to replace those belongings. Steve refreshingly surprised me when explaining his financial position in this case to be preferential in the instance of either spending time and energy repairing something that is broken or using money to replace it. The families limited finances, means that instead of feeding into the single-use outlook that capitalism has made increasingly irresistible to adopt, they are forced to allocate time, energy, and skill in order to repair their possessions.


Vowing to never fully return to land, Steve consistently questions the harm to the environment that everything that the family and initiative are gifted may do and also the ethics of companies that they are involved with. Going as far as not accepting an electric car from a global car manufacturer due to the questionable sourcing of the elements of the battery within.


Even feeling guilty for the dent in the riverbed that The Annette unavoidably makes when docked for repairs, Steve and Monika will be satisfied once they minimise their mark on the earth as much as possible. Quite contrary to the popular ambition to ‘leave one's mark on the world’ in order to be remembered once time has passed, this family are quite impossible to forget predominantly because of their mission to heal their own and others’ marks on the earth and environment.


The Annette docked beside the Helford River. Image: Jake Husband.

Considering the sheer amount of effort that this work requires in order to be accomplished, as consumers it suggests a time to reflect on the bigger picture, that time is running out to really make a difference. Approximately 5,000 items of marine plastic pollution have been found per mile of beach in the UK. If we can change our consumerist habits with this figure in mind, perhaps by making environmentally friendly swaps for our everyday plastic items and taking more care to recycle our plastics, the sheer amount of plastic waste getting into our oceans, beaches and waterways could be reduced and become a more manageable feat to retrieve.


In all likelihood, this would not make a huge difference to the vast amount of plastic in the waterways, ocean and upon the shores, yet this does not by any means devolve the importance of considering individualistic consumer attitudes, supporting organisations such as Clean Ocean Sailing is another way that a big change can be made. As aforementioned, such charities and initiatives don’t only do the physical work to retrieve the waste but they hold the distributors, corporations, government and even local businesses accountable for their decisions regarding plastic waste, as these decisions affect the environment far more than some may realise.


Henceforth, I could do nothing more than to encourage as many people as possible to find a project local to you, wherever that may be, that donates their time, energy and expertise to the environment in one way or many. Whether that be a similar ocean clean-up project or something else, it is an experience I must recommend entirely. And if you cannot donate monetarily, donations of time, energy and support in any ways possible is what allows them to continue their work and more importantly what drives their hunger to do it.

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