I did my ‘goodbye garbage’ green wave project in a slightly unusual place this year. This exotic place was called Wreck Reef located in the Coral Sea about 250 nautical miles North-East of Brisbane, Australia. I sailed here with my Mum and Dad on our 41ft family sailing boat, we spent a week at Wreck Reef enjoying nature putting on its best show for us. This Reef is completely deserted no humans, no boats, it’s beautiful! The coral atolls are bursting with marine life and on the Island itself there are thousands of Terns, Masked Boobies, and plenty of hermit crabs. The reef showed no real sign of damaged from mankind however once we set foot on the Island we found everything from plastic drums, plastic sun chairs, thongs (shoes), ropes, plastic water bottles to aerosol cans, all of these had been washed up from boats and from the mainland (Australia). It was interesting to note that a lot of the garbage was higher up inland not on the tidal line this because natural disasters such as; cyclones would have swept all of it up high into the Island, where the birds make their nests and lay their eggs. Every day we would go ashore and do a clean up around the Island it was so sad to see that the birds had integrated the garbage into their lifestyle, we would regular find birds sitting on plastic sun chairs and enjoying tearing the Styrofoam apart.

Quick Info:

• Date: 23/09/2011
• Location: Wreck Reef, Australia