WCHA Northern Lakes & Clean Muskoka Together

Back at the Muskoka Earth Festival in May of 2022, the Chapter learned about a great volunteer cleanup effort being run by the District of Muskoka. The Clean Muskoka Together program involves volunteers registering to organize clean-up crews to collect litter polluting the area. Individuals are provided with disposable safety gloves and specially marked garbage bags that can be dropped off  at various municipal waste stations at no cost for proper disposal.

As a trial run, member Murat Vardar registered to receive a clean-up kit and spent some time canoeing around his cottage lake over many early mornings for three weeks in July. To assist with collecting sunken litter on the lake bottom, a specially made garbage spear was made by modifying a canoe pole and utilizing a set of emergency ice picks.  With this and other tools, Murat managed to collect a total of of 69.75 pounds of human debris from the waters of the lake and shoreline.

Items included:

• 3, five-gallon buckets
• 11 pounds of sunken scrap metal
• 6 foot piece of vinyl siding
• 46 golf balls
• 6 tennis balls 
• 35 sunken aluminum cans
• 13 single use plastic bottles
• 2, five-litre water jugs
• 2 glass wine bottles
• 31 feet of sunken line / rope
• broken real estate signs
• 2 waterlogged PFDs
• a punctured 2 person inflatable raft
• broken 40" foam bodyboard
• sunken buoys and rubber dock edging
• numerous bits of food wrappers, plastic bags, snagged fishing lures, bits of dock foam, punctured inflatable vinyl floaties, plastic beach toys

Calculations reveal he paddled approximately 66 km during these multiple trips effectively travelling 3 times the perimeter of the shoreline as part of the cleanup effort.

The items were bagged, sorted and left at the transfer station for proper disposal. Plans are in the works to organize another paddle "clean-up day" with fellow Chapter Members in the fall of 2022 or early spring of 2023. If you have a suggestion as to a possible location in the Muskoka District that needs a hearty canoe crew for clean-up, contact Murat to discuss.