Laura, Jack and I joined the Portsmouth City of Sanctuary group at their 3-monthly beach clean - this time at the beach adjacent to Port Solent.

What a lot of small pieces of coloured plastic trapped in the seaweed! And so many huge pieces of tubing, metal & broken pieces of boat half-buried in the sand!

Jack imagined digging for pirate treasure and did really well in finding so many buried items.

Certainly a place to revisit for another beach clean.

We joined Scott from People & Stories and John from Action Asylum with his team of volunteers for a shore clean this morning.

Most of our finds were rather uninspiring but standard - lolly sticks, vapes, McDonalds ketchup containers amongst a huge amount of microplastic nurdles. Rather appropriately for Armistice Day, Jen and Action Asylum volunteer Adam found a carrier bag containing an Army Brigadier uniform. John and Catherine had some military know-how and were able to work out some details from the buttons.

The sun shining made for a lovely morning out know the shoreline. Thanks to Scott and John for inviting us to join.

A blustery afternoon was spent clearing litter from the beach whilst the tide was out. And we were joined by People & Stories and City of Sanctuary and met some new friends with some lovely chats.

We made our way around the top of the beach until the seaweed and rocks became dangerously slippy and so headed back for some refreshment with plenty of full bags!

A CoS member decided that the cardigan they found was too waterlogged to be worn on a Saturday night on the town. And Val won the pick by spotting the obligatory pair of pants. Sadly it was an undergarment too far and they had to stay in their resting place. Tess was very happy with all the fuss she received, although slightly miffed that noone had treats, even after she'd been spoilt at Pets at Home earlier in the day!

This beach clean was organised by People and Stories in collaboration with us, Jetsam and City of Sanctuary. When it was booked the coronation hadn't been announced and we envisioned a sunny, shorts and t-shirts kind of day!!

Despite the weather, there were still plenty of us and we managed to fill 7 or 8 bags of rubbish in an hour. The most interesting find was a buggy, we also found a very broken umbrella and lots of little plastics and polystyrene. We had fun pulling bits of rope and fishing line out of the depths of the beach.

We had an interesting chat with some of the asylum seekers and learnt some new words in Farsi, Spanish and Italian!

A new location for us today at Port Solent to clean the shoreline with the team from City of Sanctuary. We split into groups and started progressing along the shoreline collecting small bits of rubbish and logging them on the Jetsam app. We split into groups with one person having the Jetsam app so plastic and litter could be logged and photographed. Brian paired up with Scott and he found half a gardening fork that had been discarded after it had broken. Jo logged the rubbish on the app whilst Jenny and Vicki dug into the seaweed to find it. The seaweed was so dense that we all sank into it but thankfully didn’t get stuck whilst we were picking. As well as the large amounts of plastic wrappers, polystyrene, fishing line and rope we also added cutlery, retractable Stanley knife and plastic components from boats. We headed back to Scott’s car with the rubbish whilst Brian kindly offered to discard a large bag of rubbish and the broken fork.

Despite the dull weather, we still turned out to clean the shore line along with the team from City of Sanctuary.

We didn't find too many big recyclables but there were quite a few smaller bits so still plenty to log on the Jetsam app.

Scott made the most of his wellies and pulled a flipper, a cone and something shaped like a toilet seat out of the mud!

We found pants, a sock and part of a sea shoe as well as a huge piece of rope.

We filled 3 bin bags in around 75 minutes, not bad at all. It's good to see that the area is looking cleaner than it used to. Great work everyone!