Cleaning up beaches for Surfing Day

Surfers will drop their boards, at least for a few hours, to help clean their local beaches during International Surfing Day.

Tony Soriano, the Huntington Beach and Seal Beach chapter president of the Surfrider Foundation, will be hosting a beach cleanup and paddle-out at Huntington City Beach near Sixth Street and Pacific Coast Highway from noon to 4 p.m. Thursday.

“I find that when I surf out there in the water, I find so much trash lying all over the place,” he said. “I find so much debris lying all over. People aren’t thinking when they deposit their trash out in the middle of our parking lot and it blows into our ocean.”

Several countries around the world will be hosting similar events.

June 20 was selected as the day to celebrate surfing because it is the longest day of the year, Soriano said.

Soriano and the Surfrider Foundation understand the importance of keeping trash out of the ocean and host beach cleanups regularly.

“It’s killing our marine life. Whales are eating the plastic bags because they think it’s jellyfish,” he said. “Porpoises are doing the same. Birds are eating bottle caps. They can’t digest it, so they die. If trees are the lungs of the earth, then oceans are the same way. If you kill any of the plant life in the ocean, you’ll have no life.”

—Anthony Clark Carpio