Going forward with a clean beach

Lindsay Sandham

The Imua Outrigger Club is making good on its name.

The club, whose name means “go forward” in Hawaiian and which

paddles out on the Back Bay, is more than just people who enjoy this

Hawaiian form of canoeing. They’re a family, and an environmentally

conscientious family at that.

In February, Imua adopted a beach along the western edge of the

Upper Newport Bay as part of the city of Newport Beach’s

Adopt-A-Beach program.

“What’s great with [members of Imua] is they’re basically the

watchdogs that are there everyday,” said Earth Resources Foundation

executive director Stephanie Barger. “That’s the beauty of this whole

Adopt-A-Beach program; it’s where people are playing and living, so

they’re more conscientious.”

The program itself started in May of 2004. The city of Newport

Beach contracted with the Earth Resources Foundation, a nonprofit

devoted to educating the public about environmental issues, to run

the program.

“We provide them with a bucket, trash bags, gloves and trash

claws, and then the requirement is that they clean the beach once a

month,” Barger said. “What we find is that most of our beach captains

clean once a week. They [Imua] pick up every week, if not multiple

times a week.”

Imua holds four or five practices a week, and a member or members

from the team pick up before every practice and try to fill at least

one bucket.

Heather Picquelle, coach of the women’s team, said they had a big

beach clean-up in February when they first adopted their beach area.

She said about 40 people showed up and the work took six hours

because the beach it needed it so badly.

“It was one of the ways to say thanks to the city,” Picquelle

said.

Dave Martyn, a member of the men’s team and beach captain for

Imua, said it’s a very symbiotic relationship -- they are allowed to

store their boats at the Newport Aquatic Center, and in turn, they

keep the beach in front of the center clean for everyone who uses it.

“Its so nice to go out on the water and come back to the beach

knowing that I’m not going to step on a piece of glass or something,”

Martyn said. “When there’s a big rain, our estuary literally becomes

part of the Santa Ana River, so we have a lot of trash that gets into

the watershed from the inland.”

He said that since they conducted the initial clean-up, upkeep is

really just a matter of maintenance.

The Adopt-A-Beach program is just one of the ways Imua promotes

itself as a family organization, Martyn said.