It was a beautiful but cold morning and Sam and Jo met at Milton Locks Nature Reserve with SSUK and other volunteers to clean the beach around that area. Sam came suitably dressed with wellies whilst Jo came in a pair of old trainers, I bet you can guess who went home with dry feet. After we all had been briefed, grabbed a bag, gloves and pickers we headed off into the muddy shore to collect a lot of broken glass, food cartons, metal screws and old fishing rope. At the briefing they had warned us about a lot of glass that had been washed up and they weren't wrong. There was so much of it you could have spent hours just collecting the glass and you would still have found more.

We started towards the entrance to the Sailing club and found a mixture of food cartons before we found a BMW car key, the bottom half of a golf club, floor lino, rubber tubing followed by more glass. Wading out where the tide had gone was muddy, wet and sticky so we dropped off a heavy bag and headed towards the other side of the beach to fill another bag.

We decided to try one more time near the muddy part of the beach as this is where a lot of the rubbish was stuck in the mud and Sam was in her element. She headed off towards the entrance of the lock and managed to pick up, two tyres, part of a wellington boot (not hers), a broken buoy. from a boat. Jo found the top half of a spade, and old brush and more rubber tubing before going back with our third bag and stopping for the day.

Although we started clean we certainly didn't end up clean, Sam's lovely yellow jacket wasn't that yellow when she left and Jo's trainers had seen better days.