PORT ANGELES — Carrie Marshall and her daughters enjoyed a mostly sunny Earth Day on the Port Angeles seashore Saturday as they picked up everything from cigarette butts to rubber hoses and glass shards.
The Sequim resident and her daughters, Ayla, 10, and Ocean, 7, were among those who helped clean up Hollywood Beach and along Olympic Discovery Trail east to Francis Street Park.
“The girls really love to go to the beach every year . . . and it’s the Japan tsunami debris that’s really our interest,” said Carrie Marshall, a volunteer beach-monitoring member for the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, who along with her daughters made up Team Mobilize 365.
“We’re all beach nerds here,” Marshall quipped, holding a white bag while her daughters picked up beach litter with their blue-gloved hands.
COASST volunteers, now numbering more than 700, watch the coastal beaches from Northern California to Alaska, said Janet Lamont, Olympic Coast Discovery Center coordinator at The Landing mall in Port Angeles.
She had some Japanese floats that were found washed up at Kalaloch inside the Olympic National Park coastline and at Hobuck Beach, south of Neah Bay.
“Mostly it’s the COASST volunteers who are finding” the floats and other debris believed to be related to the March 11, 2011, Japanese tsunami, Lamont said.
“They are saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’” she said.
That leads them to believe that what they found floated from northeast Japan after the devastating 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami.
“They are our eyes and ears for the coast,” Lamont added, referring to the COASST monitors.
Above the beach, members of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce Ambassadors were pulling litter from the bushes along Olympic Discovery Trail as part of the chamber’s Earth Day volunteer contribution.
Lindsey Veenema, niece of chamber Executive Director Russ Veenema, as well as Donna Pacheco and Emily Straling were among a group of eight ambassadors working the trail from the chamber office on Railroad Avenue east to Francis Street Park.
“The ambassadors did this last year,” Port Angeles’ Lindsey Veenema said, recalling finding scraps of metal and other “unmentionables.”
“I would be doing it no matter what. It’s a great thing to do” for Earth Day and any day, she added.
Straling, of Sequim, said she was there because “the sea life is kind of special to you, you know.”
Pacheco, also of Port Angeles, said she was happy to be involved on Earth Day.
At The Landing mall’s Earth Day swap meet, Diane and David Frandsen of Sequim displayed their rugs made of regenerated clothing such as denim and T-shirts.
They were among a few vendors that included recycled hardware and jewelry inside the north atrium of The Landing, where a band could be heard playing country music to a sparse audience.
“It’s machine-washable and handwoven,” Diane Frandsen said, looking over the colorful rugs the Frandsens design and manufacture at their home, 121 Turnstone Lane.
“This is our first outing,” she said of the couple who recently relocated to Sequim from Rockville, Colo., where they made and sold rugs that cost $25 each.
Beach cleanups were conducted throughout the North Olympic Peninsula on Saturday, including near Joyce, at Clallam Bay and on the Pacific Coast.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2390 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.