This weekend, fourteen volunteers from the Naval Air Station in Lemoore visited Avila Beach to participate in a Stewardship Travel Beach Cleanup. Stewardship Travel is about adding a bit of “doing good and feeling good” to your vacation. Visitor’s stewardship activities benefit the Central Coast and also add deeper purpose to their vacation.

We would like to give a special thank you to Austin Maerz, Naval Air Station Sailor from Lemoore, who took charge and organized this event with us. There were 14 Naval Air Station sailors who volunteered to help clean our beach and pick up trash for 2 hours. These volunteers were stationed in Lemoore from all over- Texas, New Jersey, Hawaii and Guam to name a few. In their 2 hours spent cleaning the beach, they picked up over 20 pounds of trash.

In addition to the 14 Navy volunteers, there were two generous beach-goers who saw the group picking up trash and asked if they could participate also! Another beach-goer thanked the group for what they were doing and when he found out that they were from the Naval Air Station, he thanked them for their service as well.

It was an extremely successful day! One volunteer who lived three blocks from the beach in her hometown of New Jersey said she used to participate in their beach cleanups and that prompted her to want to help out along the Central Coast. Another volunteer from Hawaii said they wanted to do the cleanup again in the future; and the daughter of a volunteer, 13 year old Shelbi Reis, told us, “Don’t litter, make the sand glitter!”

Again, thank you to all who participated and helped in this event and for keeping Avila Beach clean! If you would like to learn more about Stewardship Travel or participate in a beach clean up of your own (no group or prior notice required), please click here.

More pictures from the beach clean up: