How many fridges are floating in our oceans?

If you would like to help clean a Panama beach make a donation on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sailingmokara To buy a T-Shirt: https://sailingmokara.com/product/ive-helped-clean-a-beach-short-sleeve-unisex-t-shirt/ https://sailingmokara.com/product/i-helped-clean-a-beach-youth-short-sleeve-t-shirt-2/ After the storms there is always a huge amount of debris floating in the sea. One morning we were sitting having breakfast when we spotted a strange object floating towards us. Shawn and the boys went to investigate. It was an old discarded fridge! We’ve seen many fridges floating in the waters of Panama. So we decided to tow this one back to land before it drifted into a boat or out to sea where it could have become a navigational hazard. Dylan had some fun riding in the fridge on the way to the marina! Shortly after Shawn’s birthday it was Dylan’s. It was quite a milestone birthday for Dylan - 13!! Birthdays have become less about what we get and more about how we can spoil each other on the day. We don’t have shops or Amazon really available to have endless present delivered, so its normally just a few small token gifts that I manage to find in the supermarket wrapped up and then a day of FUN! On Dylan’s agenda was all his favourite things to do. Snorkelling, spearfishing, pizza, friends and wake boarding! Being in an area far from cities makes provisioning slightly challenging. We have a fruit and veg truck which comes to the marina everyday, which we use for all our fresh produce. But eventually we need to get to a big store to buy things like pasta, rice, flour, peanut butter etc. Some friends anchored close to us managed to borrow a car for a day and we all took the opportunity to go into Colon to do some grocery shopping. It is around an hours drive from Linton Bay and along the way you pass a few small villages. The countryside is beautiful, with jungle and rolling hills. Because the villages are so remote there is no garbage collection, so the road was covered in trash! As you enter a village you see it building up, and then the entire side of the road is just piled high! It was a terrible sight, and very sad. If there is no collection what do people do? They don’t really have a choice. We know it rains hard here in Panama, which means all this garbage gets washed away from where it is left, probably into the rivers and sea. It made me realise why there is so much on the uninhabited islands, as they just catch it all, before it heads out to sea. The supermarkets in Panama are massive! They are all the American supermarkets, so you can get pretty much anything you like. I did a massive shop which filled up all our lockers. So we should be fine for a long time before we need to do a trip into town again! Along the way we got to stop at a town called Portabello. This is where Shawn had to go to check us into Panama. It’s a very small town with a lot of history. There is a castle which was very important in the 16th and 17th century, and was fought over by the Spanish and English, which meant it had to be rebuilt a number of times. It was a beautiful historical site to see. I just hope we can take the boat there once it’s safe to do so because of COVID. The last perfect day we took a long dinghy ride around the mainland to a secluded beach! We had 3 families and 3 dinghy, as it was a way to go you need to make sure you are not alone! We anchored the dinghy behind the surf and swam to shore. The beach was beautiful! It was in the middle of the jungle, we spotted sloths and jaguars. Sadly there was an awful amount of plastic on the beach. As we had to swim back to the dinghy’s through the surf with bags and children it was not possible for us to pick up rubbish and take it home with us without risking loosing it in the surf. Also there was so much that we would have needed an army of people and bags to make even a small difference! I hate seeing what we are doing to these beautiful places. Its hard to believe that there is not a place on earth that is not touched by human pollution! I’d hate to think how these places will look in 25 years time! We are not sure what the answer is, and we feel a little helpless. Perhaps all we can do is highlight the problem in the hope that people will become more conscious in their everyday lives, and stop using convenience items such as take away packaging or plastic drinks. If we all refuse to buy these items maybe we can slow down the production of them… We’ve decided we need to try and make a difference and get these beaches cleaned up. So we are going to raise funds to get a local recycling company to come and collect the trash we collect. We are also going to try and get the help of the local community. We hope that if they can see what a difference we can make, the waste will not end up in the rivers and sea in the first place.