Baycare volunteers clean up rubbish and litter at Gymea Bay Baths.
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00:00Hi everyone, my name is Matt Hunt. I am a Guymear Bay resident. I am the founder of
00:06this group we call Baycare which we started two years ago. As you can see we've got some members
00:11down here today. The idea of Baycare was to help solve, at least alleviate the problem of rubbish
00:20being dumped into the baths and the surroundings. Since about two years ago fishing has taken off
00:28massively in the area which we're not anti-fishing at all but the increase in popularity has meant
00:35that there's been a massive increase of fishing related rubbish such as bait packets in particular
00:42going into the water and into the surrounding butch land. We've also had soft drink cans, fast
00:48food wrappers in particular. We've worked really well with council, some members of state government.
00:55We're waiting for a reply from Chris Mings on how to address this problem even further. We've made
01:01good progress in regard to bins being put in, buckets being put in for lines and hooks but
01:08there is a lot more work to go. It's getting cleaned more regularly but the aim of it is for us not to
01:15exist anymore to do the cleaning up. I think one of the other things that we need to try to encourage
01:23the Department of Fisheries to be able to put some more resources to training or educating some of
01:29these young fisher people to know how to respect the environment and look after the beautiful area
01:35that they're fishing in. Another issue that's come up which wasn't one of our prime motivators was the
01:41water quality in this area and for the Shire to have had such a poor quality report for 10 years
01:46is appalling. I'm not something to be proud of.