Thanks to Katie for todays pun.

It’s a Saturday morning, Parkrun day and also one of our regular meet ups with Southsea Beachwatch for the monthly beach clean. It was also the first of 2 community missions that Goodgym Portsmouth were doing today.

Several of us took part at the Parkrun prior to the beach clean to ensure that we were all warmed up and ready for the stretching, lunging and reaching that we would be doing with our pickers later. The beach clean this month started West of Southsea Pier and it was great to be joined by our parkrun runners as well as Jen who arrived speedily with her daughter in pushchair. Welcome and hello also to David and David who joined us today on their first Community Mission.

With grabbers and bags in hand we took our customary group photo, (plastic bag mishap in zip from Louisa) and we ventured off towards the pier as that is where most of the rubbish gets accumulated. On the way, we found the usual assortment of bottle tops, pen tops, cigarette butts and plastic wrappers. People split into their own groups and some tackled the rubbish to the West of the pier and some headed towards the Eastney side of the beach.

Angela and Rachel headed towards the pier where they collected an assortment of metal which had been left when the pier was repaired along with a single sock. Katie, Louisa, Maura and Jo remained near the pier collecting an assortment of bottle tops, fishing lines, plastic netting and Jo ventured under the pier to attempt to retrieve the hard to reach litter. Tracey, Judy and Mel headed towards Eastney over the other side of the pier to collect more rubbish from that side of the beach. Jen started her daughter early with the Goodgym spirit and did an excellent job of collecting rubbish near the shore line putting everything they found into a bucket before emptying it out into a bag.

As Tracy quoted at the end

We may not have collected much, but altogether it’s a lot’.

The next beach clean will be on 13 April where we will coincide our Parkrun meetup too