Bonita Cove - Mission Bay

I joined ‘I Love a Clean San Diego’ for 'Movies Over Messes' community cleanup at Bonita Cove on this overcast Saturday morning.  Bonita Cove is on the ocean side of Mission Bay, a bit out of my east side neighborhood.  The ‘movie’ was an incentive for some, a free ticket to the preview screening of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, not really interested in the movie, but a worthwhile time was spent outside ... and I avoided having to rake the leaves in front yard for another day.



Altho Bonita Cove can be considered a fairly large area, the bright orange tent of ILACSD is pretty easy to find.  I usually bring my own supplies, but they are also available at the check in tent for those who drop by.  The black bags are for trash, white for recyclable and HD buckets for the misc along with single use plastic gloves.  I wear my own plastic gloves underneath my leather gloves – the plastic protects my hands while the leather protects the plastic.


After a brief welcome meeting, most of the folks head to the shore line.  The beach is high profile and more fun for sure, anything along the water is more fun than a parking lot.  Since I don’t make it over to this area often, and I may not have done this if I had a cleanup partner, but ... I figured who knows where the trash is better than the local residents at this end of the park.  So I asked this group of fellas if they had would like me to take any trash they might have as part of the bay clean up.


And they did, filling my recycle basket with a couple beer bottles and this combination of rum and coke.  When I asked about the diet cola, I was told he was wanting to keep looking good.


He also kept a very nice homesite, one of the better ones.  I was also told it was ok to clean up this abandoned site.


Despite all of the bags of trash that were brought in ... guess who brought in the single heaviest bag full?  Easily 4x the runner up, perhaps asking the homeless encampment for their trash is cheating, but I don’t look at is a competition, it’s about keeping the bay reasonably clean.


OK it’s not a competition, but I’ll keep the T shirt anyway.


Here are the summary stats as posted by I love a Clean San Diego:

· 180 volunteers! At 2 hours of work per volunteer, we logged over 360 hours of cleanup time!
· 178 lbs of trash collected! A TON of it was tiny straws, cigarette butts, and confetti!
· 41 lbs of recycling collected! You helped clear the area of a ton of glass and plastic bottles!
· 3,596 cigarette butts collected! Inevitably, some butts weren’t sorted out of trash bags and counted, so it is safe to tell your friends and family you collected NEARLY 4,000 BUTTS!  <note: I did not separate my butts, not very nice to do so in front of the folks who helped me pick them up>