This is Joy introducing me to all the volunteers who have come to help clean the beach.
As you can see there were a lot of volunteers, (50 in total) a mixed group of helpers of all ages. They worked really hard cleaning up the litter. My legs are very short and it was a bit hard for me to keep up, walking on all those pebbles, so two girls, Eva and Alice carried me for a while in their back pack.
We collected almost 30 bags of litter in total, phew! This is us all having a well deserved break.Out of all the different types of litter found on the beach the most common material is plastic. This does more damage to wildlife, in and out of the water, than any other type of litter. A million sea birds and 100, 000 marine mammals around the world die each year from being entangled in, or by swallowing, plastic litter. About 30 - 40% of the litter found on the beach is left behind by beach visitors. This means that if we could encourage people to take it home instead of leaving it on the beach this would make a big difference.
Better still, people can take their litter home and recycle it along with the rest of their household rubbish. Removing all the plastic rubbish in the ocean is impossible. We can all help though by making sure no more plastic ends up in the ocean. Recycling can also save oil, as this is used to make new plastic items. At the Eco Schools conference we took part in all the participants (including ourselves) were given a bag like the one below.
It may be hard to believe but this bag was made from recycled plastic bottles. I hope you all recycle as much of your household rubbish as you can.
Bye for now
Ed
Our stand included information and pictures about my local beach at 
This is the area of the beach where all the interesting seashells and other natural debris is washed ashore. Sadly, as mentioned in my earlier blog, marine litter is washed up to.
Empty whelk shells are also washed up on the beach. 
These are the type of empty shell that hermit crabs sometimes live in as they don't have a hard shell of their own.
Dogfish egg cases are one of my favourite. Its amazing that a baby fish spends 9 months growing inside it before they hatch.
This is what they look like inside the egg case. You can sometimes see them in public aquariums.
Steve's favourite eggs washed up on the beach are cuttlefish eggs, which look like a black bunch of grapes. This is because they are often still alive and can be rescued.
He hatches them out in a fish tank and then returns them to the sea. When they hatch out they are miniature replicas of the parents.
They can change colour to camouflage themselves and squirt ink as a defence. You can also find the white internal shell of cuttlefish, usually called cuttlefish bones. 
This is the dried remains of a pipe fish washed up on the beach.
These are oyster shells (above). The oyster has two halves to its shell and lives on the seabed filtering tiny bits of food from the water. In the UK, over 100 years ago in the Victorian period, oysters were very popular to eat. They were so popular that the Victorians collected too many of the oysters and so they had to find some more to replace them. They collected oysters from the east coast of the USA and released them in the English Channel.
The oysters did not do very well, but the slipper limpets survived and multiplied. This is because there was plenty of food (they eat plankton) and they had few natural predators because they had moved to the UK waters. The slipper limpet shell is now one of the most common seashells washed up here on Sussex beaches.
This is a spider crab shell (above). When they are alive, spider crabs disguise their shells using seaweed and sponges so they can hide on the seabed. Like all crabs they shed their shell as they grow. So when you find a crab shell on the beach it does not mean the crab died.
It is very delicate and it is unusual to find one that is in one piece, they usually get broken on the beach.
The aim of the course is to challenge children's perceptions about sharks, to show children that while sharks may not be the dangerous man-eater that everyone thinks, the truth is actually more amazing (hence the title, "The Amazing World of Sharks").
We wanted the children to understand how important sharks are in marine food webs for keeping them healthy and in balance.
Again we used a series of questions that included "are you more likely to be killed by an elephant or a shark", "are you more likely to be killed by a coconut than a shark".
The first question in the quiz is how many people are killed by sharks each year (the actual answer is between 5 - 15). The last question is how many sharks are killed by humans each year (the answer is over 1 million). This really surprised the children and me as well. I am hoping to see some sharks on my journey and hopefully help raise awareness.
One of the worst thing people do to the sharks is to kill them for their fins to make shark fin soup. The sharks are caught and the fins cut off and the rest of the shark thrown back into the sea, sometimes while it is still alive. Its unbelievable how cruel some humans can be.
There was a steady supply of timber from the trees that covered the chalk hills to the North - the South Downs. They could be floated down river to Shoreham and sawn up to make the ships. Over the years vessels were made for trade, to combat piracy and some took part in major sea battles against the Spanish Armada and during the 100 Year War. In the 1800's, the Victorian Period, there was an industrial Renaissance. Wooden sail vessels were no longer required, now it was the age of iron and steam. 
