It took nearly a month, 20 miles of walking back and forth, and an enormous amount of dragging and carrying, but John and Carol Koerner have removed a 150-foot-long and 40-foot-wide abandoned fishing net from a Little Cayman beach where it was sat for years.
The couple spent most of March removing the giant net from the beach at Diggery Point on the south coast of the island.
The net, shaped like a wind sock, with three separate layers, weighed an estimated 3,500 pounds.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” admitted John Koerner. “I started cutting into it and once I got started, I didn’t want to quit.”
“It was basically three separate nets in one, an outer net, a middle one and inner one,” he explained.
At its widest part, the net was 45 feet, and at it narrowest, 35 feet.
First he tried using a machete to cut it, “but it only managed to cut for about 10 minutes before it got dull”, he said. “Then I tried cutting it with a bunch of different things. I had a really nice handsaw that didn’t get dull. And I had two or three pruning shears that I’d resharpen as they got dull.”
He and Carol began the removal operation on 5 March and finally finished on 31 March.
About a third of the net was buried in sand and rock, so they had to dig it out before cutting it.
An eyesore for a decade
John said one person told him the net may have been on the beach for 10 years or more.
“I was talking to a contractor who said he’d tried to get it off the beach using a backhoe years ago but he couldn’t budge it. It’s been stuck there for years,” he said.
He added, “My wife and I realised if we couldn’t get it off the beach, it’d be there forever.”
Abandoned fishing nets, often called ‘ghost nets’, are not an uncommon sight. Just last week, in Grand Cayman, a fisherman found one with three dead sharks entangled in it.
Getting the net off the beach
The net on Little Cayman stretched as far as 40 feet inland from the beach, with parts nestled among the shoreline bushes.
Cutting it up into manageable pieces was just the first challenge. The next was getting it off the beach, as the closest place they could park was 950 feet away, John said.
He cut the main net into 34 sections, and cut the two inner nets into 10 sections each.
“So, we had 54 sections of net, which weighed between 50 and 100 pounds each. We had to take 55 trips from the beach to the parking area.”
To do this, they wound the sections of net around a big wooden pole, which they then carried on their shoulders. They placed smaller sections of the net onto a large of tarpaulin which they dragged to the parking lot.
“We did 20 miles of walking to get the net off the beach,” he said.
Repurposing the net
Each section of the net they have removed now sits in rolls in the parking area, where the couple hopes people will pick it up and repurpose.
Carol is already using the netting to make handbags.
Their hard work was highlighted in a social media post by the Little Cayman District Committee of the National Trust, which described them as “superstars”.
Dedicated plastic debris removal
The Koerners, from Vermont in the US, spend four to five months a year on Little Cayman, and dedicate several hours a day to cleaning beaches on the island. They say they have personally removed 2,000 pounds of trash from Diggery Point alone, and almost 10,000 pounds from beaches around the island over the last four months.
John says if he and his wife have been able to remove so much plastic debris during their time on island, working three hours a morning, two people employed full time would be able to make major inroads into removing plastics from the beaches.
Many residents on the island take part in regular beach clean-ups, but the influx of plastics on local beaches seems never-ending.
However, the Koerners say dedicated, full-time efforts to remove the debris would mean that many of the beaches that are now eyesores could be fully cleaned up, so that future efforts to clean them would not be so onerous.
“If you entirely clean a beach one time, the maintenance would not be overwhelming. It could be done,” John said.
“I know if we could get two people picking up trash, we could get it cleaned up.”
He said he hoped he had shown that, as he is about to turn 67 soon, if he and his wife can remove large amounts of plastic debris, and a giant abandoned fishing net, from local beaches, it is not an insurmountable task.
Related Videos
Congratulations to the Koerners. They’re doing more than “lip service” to improving the environment. Hopefully, the locals can now do something constructive with the net material.