As my faithful readers know, my community service this year was cleaning the beach every Sunday afternoon. It was extremely rewarding to help, and at the same time to walk for an hour and to meditate while enjoying the beautiful beach and weather. A three in one: community service, meditation, and exercise.

During the Winter months, the strong winds (I guess) blew in all kinds of trash, sometimes in the course of an hour I had to empty my big bucket (you know, the 5-gallon blue buckets) up to three times! Now in the warmer months there was remarkably less trash. Anyway, that was my highly scientific (not) guess.

Fortunately, I am not the only one on beach cleaning duty, I do bump occasionally into other people cleaning up. The town also has 4 buckets available at the entrance to the beach if you want to grab one and clean up.

On top of all that there is a bit of a treasure hunter thrill, and a fun component to what you find or might find. Here is an incomplete list of things I have found:

• Bottle tops – this is the most popular trash on the beach ☹
• Plastic forks and spoons – really people?
• Bottles – mostly plastic but also glass. All sorts of bottles: drinks, shampoo, oil, you name it…
• Bits of plastic – from tiny to huge and in all colors. You cannot even tell what they used to be a part of.
• Flip flops – every Sunday at least one! Usually, barnacle incrusted.
• Cigarette lighters
• Deflated balloon
• Hammerhead shark – dead
• Comb – I picked it up, not because I needed it.
• Eyeglasses – no glass and broken, but I do not need them.
• Lure – with a massive hook I gave it to a dude fishing.
• Dog Tag – Palm Beach.
• Part of a propeller – someone surely missed it…
• Etc. Etc.

Oh, and make sure you do not step on the Portuguese Man-O-War… or their deadly, long tentacles.