VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - A brigade of kayakers went out onto the water off Owls Creek Boat Launch on Sunday, not to relax, but to pick up leftover trash floating around.
Derrick Jones was one of them.
"I wonder why people aren't thinking about their environment,” Jones told News 3 before we boarded his kayak.
That was the question on his mind, but he had an answer that involved him taking action: “[I want] to help clean up the waterways and help keep it pristine and nice clean for people to enjoy."
He said he recently started taking on kayaking as a hobby. He was able to mix his new passion with cleaning up the inlet during the Tidewater Kayak Angler’s Association’s annual Trash-n-Fish Waterway Cleanup.
It was Jones’ first year volunteering.
"It makes me wonder why people throw stuff, trash, even on the roadways and in the water,” Jones said.
"People are lazy and careless, I mean, that's just the bottom line,” Wayne Bradby, another volunteer and former TKAA treasurer, said.
Bradby has volunteered with TKAA for years and said he is always on the lookout for trash.
“We see it pretty well right on the water. We're not buzzing by it like a motorboat,” Bradby said.
The volunteers go out into the inlet with trash bags and pick up whatever pieces of trash they see. Bradby said the group finds roughly 100 pounds of trash each year.
This year, he said that the inlet is the cleanest it has ever been.
"I literally went all the way to the back, all the way to Ocean Breeze Waterpark,” Bradby said, explaining what he found, “One Gatorade bottle."
Others did come back with bags full of trash and a father and her daughters even found two tires.
"Whenever I'm out, I see trash out. It's going in the front of my boat and I'll just take it home, it's not that hard to do, you just pick it up and go,” Bradby said. “I would hope others would do the same thing and just keep it the way it is."
