A group of modern-day strandlopers is moving along the Garden Route coast. Unlike those of yore, this group is not foraging for food and sleeping in caves.
They are documenting humanity’s rubbish along the shore – our discarded plastic, fishing lines and hooks, water bottles, plastic bags – whatever junk they find in their 185km hike from Nature’s Valley to the Wilderness. It is part of The Strandloper Project, a “citizen science” endeavor. I met them last Thursday after they had hiked from Harkerville to Noetzie, apparently one of the trickiest sections of the hike. Took them nine hours and they had to concentrate on every step they took. But after a shower, a couple of gins and a pizza in Knysna, the team was looking pretty good. So what made them do it? Like many such enterprises, The Strandloper Project evolved over time. Some years ago Mark Dixon, marine biologist and hiking guide from Rondevlei, was diving at Gericke’s Point at Sedgefield when he was struck by the amount of old fishing gear discarded by recreational fishermen after their lines had snagged on rocks. This resulted not only in litter on the seabed, but also in something called “ghost fishing”, where discarded fishing gear continues to kill marine life that becomes hooked or entangled. Mark says there has been research on “ghost fishing” by discarded nets and gear from commercial fishing vessels, but not on ghost-fishing inshore by debris from recreational fishermen. Mark organised underwater cleanups with volunteers, pulling fishing gear out of the sea in an organised manner, recording what was picked up and where. This led to a big hike in 2019 where he and five others hiked from Stilbaai to Wilderness, documenting plastic pollution and “fishing debris” en route, including GPS locations. This year they did the same from Nature’s Valley to Wilderness. So what will they do with the information? They want to get it to both the public and the authorities, and hope to have conversations with municipalities about action they can take to prevent plastic rubbish getting into rivers and the sea. One of the hikers was Pam Booth, head of environmental management at Knysna Municipality who organised her municipal team to come to Noetzie last week to document “nurdles”, tiny plastic pellets used as raw material in making plastic goods. The beach was full of them, possibly from a container lost at sea. There are billions in the ocean and they are bad news: nurdles themselves are a cocktail of chemicals, and even worse, they attract toxic chemical pollutants that stick to their surface. Some of these chemicals, like persistent organic pollutants (POPs), build up in the tissues of animals and humans and cause long-term damage. I take my hat off to the Strandloper Project, getting out there doing something useful. Reminds me of the words of Wangari Maathai, that great Kenyan woman who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize: “You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, inform them and help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.”
