A day for cleaner waters

Quick, what do the following items have in common: (a) dead fish, (b) motorcycle parts, (c) syringes, (d) a mattress and (e) an entire sofa?

Answer: They’re all things Tony Soriano has fished out of the water while cleaning the shoreline around Huntington Beach.

The Huntington Beach resident, who serves as treasurer and fundraising director for the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, has spent years on the beach with crews of volunteers, trying to clear as much debris as he can. This Saturday, he’ll be joining another cleanup — maybe a bigger one than usual — as part of International Surfing Day, and he’s prepared for just about anything that his glove dredges up.

“I went skiing this past winter, and when you’re parking on the side of the road there, there’s so much debris,” Soriano said. “People park, they picnic [by the river], and all that stuff washes down to us.”

International Surfing Day, which will celebrate its fifth year this week, brings together more than a dozen countries around the world to celebrate the art of surfing. Each local chapter, though, gets to put its own spin on the event — and in Huntington Beach this year, in between the paddle-outs and board-shaping demos, the focus is on the ecology.

The area around the Santa Ana River Jetties will come alive between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. with music, dancing, surfing and information booths, while the Quiksilver Foundation will also host a cleanup at Bolsa Chica State Beach from 7 a.m. to noon. There are also a number of competitions at the River Jetties, including the Butt Challenge — with a prize going to the person who picks the most cigarette butts out of the sand — and the most amount of trash found.

The Surfrider Foundation, a San Clemente-based environmental nonprofit, founded the annual event in 2005 along with Surfing Magazine. Matt McClain, the director of marketing and communications for Surfrider, said the day started modestly the first year, with 16 locations around the United States and one in Venezuela, and has grown steadily ever since.

“We’re in over 20 countries and well over 100 event locations around the globe,” he said. “It’s really taken off quickly. We’re excited just to see the growth and to see people take this day as their own.”

Westminster resident Barbara Bosch, who is spearheading the local events with Soriano, leads a beach cleanup in Huntington each month with the Surfrider Foundation.

She said it wasn’t difficult getting surfers to volunteers to clean the beach, since many of them are environmentalists at heart.

“They don’t like diving into a wave and coming up with a bag of Doritos on their face,” she said. “So I think they appreciate what we do.”

If You Go

WHAT: International Surfing Day

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Santa Ana River Jetties and Bolsa Chica State Beach

INFORMATION: www.intlsurfingday.com