Cleaning up the Bodega Bay coast

Keary first encountered Sally when he ran into her working the Dime Pitch at a traveling carnival in San Jose.

Keary Sorenson is a self-described “surfing bum” who grew up “chasing through the forest between Santa Cruz and Los Gatos.” He’s a wiry, talkative mix of Coastal Miwok, Spanish, Irish and Norse, and his early exposure to the natural beauty of California’s forests and legendary beaches has led to a lifelong love affair with nature.

Sally Sorenson, née Fjelb-Erichsen, is a graduate of Piner High School who grew up in Rio Nido. She had Armstrong Woods as her backyard and considers herself a “river rat.”

“Dad worked the carny, and for me it was like living in a playground,” said Sally, who joined Butler Amusements and later on worked for the Foley and Burke carnival “until they went broke.”

She was running the darts concession and the Dime Pitch game for carnival operator Butler Amusements in San Jose when she first met her future beau in 1988.

Until the age of 6, Keary lived in a mortuary in nearby Los Gatos, where his father both worked and kept an ear peeled as a volunteer firefighter for the bell ringing at the fire station across the street.

“You could tell by the number of bells which neighborhood was the scene of the fire, and my dad would get there about the same time as the fire department,” Keary said.

Keary lost everything in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and remembers returning and walking on the horizontal walls to retrieve his belongings. He was living in a flat in Los Gatos and decided to come up north to where his brother worked for a backhoe company. But Keary was let go, and he found himself ringing a bell for the Salvation Army in Santa Rosa.

The bell ringer next door looked familiar, so Keary walked over and - surprise! - discovered it was Sally.

Marshall Gulch Beach is a small pocket beach below Highway 1 where Marshall Gulch Creek enters the ocean. This little fishing beach is just south of the small housing community of Carmet along the Sonoma County coast north of Bodega Bay. One day, the couple went down to the beach to have a picnic lunch.

“It was spectacular,” Keary said. But then they looked around them, and “there was so much plastic, we couldn’t eat. It felt like we were sitting in a garbage dump.”

“We policed the immediate area” and then ate lunch, but two weeks later the couple were back.

“There are pristine beaches in Santa Cruz and Southern California” Keary explained, but “the beaches around here are deposition beaches.”

Coastal deposition occurs in areas where the sea drops or deposits material. This can include sand, sediment and debris.

These beaches are the area between the lowest tide level and the point reached by the storm waves in the highest tides. Every beach is different, but they are usually made up of material deposited on a wave-cut platform. Keary explained these south-facing beaches are littered with garbage and for years, government agencies believed the main source of this trash was ships.

Keary and Sally did some research, and they now believe that 85 percent of the beach trash is from storm drains.

Sally and Keary took the trash they collected home with them and began cataloging and classifying the plastic by colors and by shapes.

“One of the most common bits of trash are Bic-style cigarette lighters,” Keary said. “Since they’re top-heavy, they bob upside down, and the white bottoms are frequently mistaken for lunch.” Seabirds such as “sooty shearwaters and northern fulmars are attracted from downwind to the smell of fish oils, squid, and krill, and when tested, investigate the area around a wick releasing such odorants,” Keary explained.

Thus began a commitment that lasted more than 10 years, during which time a monthly load averaging 600 to 700 pounds of mostly plastics passed under the couple’s microscopes.

“The colors were also significant because certain birds are attracted to red and blue, some to green, and whales to black,” Sally said.

“The ocean holds 40,000 pieces of plastic per square mile,” Keary said.

The Sorensons know which birds eat which plastics because they took a three-month course offered by the Gulf of the Farralones Marine Sanctuary, during which they learned how to identify the sex and age of birds, and how to dissect and perform necropsies on them.

More than 1,000 people applied to take the course, and only 64 were chosen. A mere 28 people completed it, and each one then was assigned to “their own beach” to regularly patrol and monitor. As luck would have it, the Sorensons were assigned to Marshall Gulch Beach, the one they favored most.

The Sorensons were given the task of examining 300 deceased common murres and discovered they all died from starvation. Plastics made up close to 90 percent of their stomach contents, the Sorensons said.

What finally cemented the couple’s commitment was their personal observation of avian suffering. There was the gull missing its upper bill, with fishing line dangling down from its mouth. There was the pigeon guillemot with a line around its body, twisting helplessly in the sand and dying before it could be rescued.

Keary and Sally Sorenson currently live in Guerneville, where they operate Everclean Carpet Cleaning and assist in cleaning the Russian River along with Chris Brokate and an enthusiastic crew.

There have been regular sojourns to the riverbank and homeless encampments, where several dumpsters have been filled to overflowing with 20 yards of garbage in each, plus visits to other trash-filled areas.

Guerneville’s storm drains have been cleaned out and businesses around town have had their steps and sidewalks steam-cleaned, thanks to the Sorensons and their well-equipped truck.

The Sorensons have never asked for compensation, nor have any of those citizens involved in tidying up the town. The enormous satisfaction of getting it done is payment enough.