Most of our work is done on the Detroit River. We’ve found that if we keep a couple of boats in a marina we can make a larger impact. All of the time we spent towing and moving boats around is now spent grabbing trash. So much of our fishing grounds are in the Detroit River, but sometimes we go Trash Fishing when we travel. Here are some pictures.
This is Stoney Island. It is an abandoned island in the Detroit River. It has a long history but it is mostly used by people who go there by boat and drink. They leave their trash all over the island. We stop by 3-4 times a year to remove trash, improve the place, and go for a swim in the lagoon. It’s a weird and magical place. The Rouge River is a river that feeds into the Detroit River. It’s pretty large, but it is an industrial river. There are no marinas or docks or pleasure craft up this way, just runoff from communities all over the area. We find a lot of trash up here. It’s a cool place to visit. We don’t swim here though. The water is very dirty from running off all of the yards, roads, parks, along its length. In this photo you can see some logs along shore. The river rises and falls quickly when it rains and those floating logs get left behind when the river recedes. This traps a lot of floating trash, which makes our job easier. We can just pluck the trash out of the branches. Belle Isle is Detroit’s nicest park. It is a giant island on the river. It’s fairly far from our marina, and there is a team of people that keep it clean, but we go there about once a season to see what we can find. We can usually find a few hundred pounds of trash that everyone else missed. Coming into the island from the water-side we can see things people on shore cannot. We clean up around Zug Island fairly often. At one time it was considered the most polluted square mile in the world.
Travel – Sometime we travel. Here are some of the spots we’ve pulled trash.
St. Augustine is one our favorite places to Trash Fish. We join the Matanzas River Keeper there and Captain Adam is always fun. We’ve been there a few times. Another picture from St. Augustine. I believe this is when we were just getting started. We visited to see how they did their river cleanups and we learned a lot. Houston Texas had a LOT of trash and a couple of cool local dudes joined us. Here is the haul from Houston. We rented a pickup truck and brought all of the debris to the dump. The people at the dump liked us and gave us a break on the price. It was a fun trip. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor had a ton of trash. I guess their sewer system just dumps it into the harbor. We brought some grabbers and went to town. California’s beaches were nice and clean, so we also tried Long Beach Harbor which netted a little more trash. Californians seemed pretty clean to be honest. We could learn a lot from them. Italy – We picked up trash in Rome and went to Ostia for a day where we found a bunch of wine bottles and pizza boxes on the beach. Italy was sloppy as heck. The way the beach had been treated was disgusting. Massachussetts – Long Beach had a bunch of trash and we were happy to pick it up on Christmas. Jacksonville – Have a late flight while doing college tours, why not go to the St. John’s River and grab some trash. There were trash barrels nearby so it was easy to take trash that had floated ashore and put it in the bins.
