By Liam Baldwin Jankiewicz, 12 July 2025
Saturday, the 12th, was a beautiful day. Around fifteen of us gathered at Hunter Carpark, a big number for a usual beach cleanup trip! We meet at Hunter Carpark and split up our survey gear, put on pink vests to look professional, and numbered off. Then we trodded across CBD, with our pink vests making us stand out amongst the general Wellington public. We reached the trailhead of Mount Victoria and had a quick break, taking in the decent weather and having epic vibes. We traversed the winding paths of Mount Victoria, looking down at the city below us and chatting amongst each other. We reached a road leading up to Mount Victoria, however, we left a pink stick at the trailhead, a cruical item for the setting up the beach cleanup area. A wonderful young man by the name of Joe, an legendary individual, voluntereed to run back down to the trailhead to retrieve the pink stick.
He left his bag behind, but I took it with me as we would meet him at Haitaitai beach. We crossed the road dividing the Mount Victoria ridgeline, traversing through a dog park, bushes and brushing past an old man. We entered in the suburb of Haitatai, analysing the beautiful old-timey architecture of this suburban landscape and historical Methodist church along Waitoa road. We walked up the steep Waitoa road and turned left onto Maitai road, then darting down a stairwell dotted along the street. It led us to Rewa Road, an road named after the 2025 VUWTC President Rewa, what a great man.
Along this road was Caith's Gooning Cave, found on google maps, being listed as an Kindergarten by an man named Caith. On google maps, it is rated five stars! With many positive recipents such as a reviewer saying he had the best goon ever, with Caith congralulating the reviewer for being a good boy, plus an Chinese man being not disappointed in the outcome.
We continued walking down the hill and reached the great Haitatai Beach, as the weather became gray and dull. We hunkered down at Cog Park for an quick lunch, as I ate five baguttes and shared some energy drinks with the team to give them heart attacks. Then we gathered up our gloves, BUT! There wasn't enough gloves for everyone, so some people had to wear one glove each unfortunately. We walked over to Haitatai Beach itself, with our pink stakes in hand and a mullet. We penetrated a pink stake into a corner of the beach and hammered it down, putting them firmly in place for good. Then we got our trust-worthy measuring tape, measuring 25m for a mid point, then another 25m for our area. We then measured 10m from each of these pink stakes, giving our 50x10m area. The weather would soon become cloudy and bleak, with sprouts of rain every few minutes or so.
There wasn't a lot of rubbish, but we found a concrete clump and named him Rocky. Once we finished our cleanup, we packed up and unpenetrated the pink stakes dotted along the beach. We then took our new friend Rocky and backtracked to Waitoa Road, deciding to go through the infamous Mount Victoria Tunnel. As we exited the long tunnel, we traversed through the CBD, our pink vests being hightlighted in the bleak and rainy weather. Once at Kelburn Campus, we opened the gear shed up and got to sorting out the rubbish! I sat on a nice outdoors chair while everyone was busy sorting the rubbish, as I was trying write down some cruical details for our beach cleanup paperwork (plus getting the scale to work). We divided our rubbish into different categories and counted/weighed them. I recorded this data onto our paperwork and took a photo of it, uploading the data to litterintelligence.org.
We found there was a litter density of 593 items per 1,000 square m, an notable increase from the 429 figure given in 2022. Hopefully this data will guide policy-makers into making informed decisions about coastal pollution in the Wellington Region!