The vet going from Land’s End to John O’Groats by paddleboard — picking up plastic as she goes!
Looking up from their cups of tea, the residents of the narrowboats lining this pretty stretch of the Shropshire Union Canal do a double-take as Cal Major glides past on what appears to be a giant ironing board.
it’s actually a paddleboard — essentially a windsurfer board without the sail and propelled by a long oar. And it’s the platform from which Cal, a 29-year- old vet from Devon, is mounting her onewoman mission to highlight the issue of plastic pollution.
Furious about the amount of plastic waste washing up on her favourite surfing beaches, she decided to do something about it. She aims to become the first person to paddleboard the 1,000 miles or so from Land’s End to John o’groats, picking up as much plastic as possible as she goes.
This extreme physical challenge will take as long as four months, and this leg is taking her inland from the Bristol Channel and along a succession of rivers and canals to Lancashire. There, just north of Preston, she will head back out to sea and gradually make her way around the Scottish coast.
When we catch up near the pretty village of Brewood in Staffordshire, she has completed around 300 miles, travelling at between three and four miles an hour and paddling up to ten hours a day.
She looks surprisingly perky despite the seasickness, strong winds and battering waves which have beset her so far on the Cornish and north Devon coasts. not to mention the physical effort of grabbing plastic with her litter-picker and placing it in a large blue bucket which fills up with depressing regularity.
‘There are parts of the canals where you can hardly put your paddle in the water without hitting a piece of plastic,’ she says.
on her approach to Brewood the previous day, she was appalled to see a duck with her ducklings, having to navigate through countless discarded plastic bottles and debris.
‘That image is imprinted on my brain,’ she says. ‘What struck me was the contrast between these innocent ducklings who were in their natural habitat, and this plastic which has no right to be polluting their environment.’
one of the worst spots was on the River Severn near Worcester.
‘The rise and fall of the river has left loads of plastic bags hanging in trees,’ she says.
other litter black spots were stretches of the canals around gloucester and Wolverhampton. There she encountered indestructible polystyrene trays still bearing remnants of takeaway food, plastic shopping bags, crisp packets and rubbish from factories.
MoST of what she discovered is horribly familiar to the 12,000- strong army of volunteers who led a remarkable three- day drive to clear plastic pollution from our streets, beaches and green spaces as part of the Daily Mail’s great Plastic Pick Up last month.
‘A lot of the plastic in the oceans has found its way there from canals and rivers. i want to help show people that just because they don’t live by the sea doesn’t mean that the plastic they are using doesn’t have an impact,’ says Cal.
‘That’s why the Daily Mail’s campaign against the over-use of plastic is so brilliant.’
Her own campaigning has been motivated, in part, by her work as a vet — seeing animals endangered by plastic pollution.
Even as a little girl growing up in Warrington, Cheshire, she was acutely aware of how precious our countryside is.
Despite being born with a condition which prevented one hip joint forming properly, she led a very active life. Her mother and father, a nurse and a chemical engineer, often took her and her two brothers for walks in the countryside. Later, she spent her gap-year diving off Australia’s great Barrier Reef.
‘That’s where i fell in love with the underwater world. i had this great feeling of peace when i was there and i knew my heart would always be in ocean conservation.’
While studying veterinary medicine and surgery at the University of Edinburgh, she spent weekends surfing from the nearest beaches and captained the women’s football team and the mixed hockey team.
But all that came to a halt when, in her final year, her childhood hip problem caught up with her, causing so much pain that she could barely walk the length of a corridor.
An operation failed to make much difference and while she was recovering, a friend gave her the litter-picker she is using on this trip.
Back then she used it to pull on her socks when she could not bend over. Sometimes she couldn’t imagine ever regaining normal mobility. ‘i had been so fit up until then, and it came as a massive blow to my confidence. it also meant i couldn’t work with large animals — which was all i’d ever really wanted to do.’
After graduating and eventually switching to treating smaller animals, she joined a practice in South Devon, which is where she discovered paddleboarding.
‘it was the first sport i’d been able to do in years, and it was like a new lease of life because being a vet can be very stressful, and time out in nature really helps alleviate that.
‘ With my journey to John o’groats, i really hope to encourage other people to get out and enjoy the environment — whether it’s mountains, oceans, parks or whatever.
‘The more we love it, the more we will want to protect it.’
Just how much that environment needs protecting became apparent to Cal from her unique vantage point on her paddleboard. ‘i could get to sea coves which are inaccessible by land and found them full of plastic bottles, old fishing equipment and so much other rubbish. it was so upsetting to see.
‘ Plastic pollution is a huge problem for our oceans, with eight million pieces of plastic entering the seas every day. it is estimated that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean, by weight, than fish.
‘in the meantime, 100,000 marine mammals, and one million seabirds die every year as a result of plastic pollution.’
CAL’S current trip was inspired after she and a friend set off on a 300mile voyage on paddleboards around the entire Cornish coast in 2016 to raise money for the organisation Surfers Against Sewage. The next year she went solo to undertake the first paddleboard circumnavigation of the isle of Skye.
‘The oceans are so precious. They produce well over half the oxygen we breathe on Earth, and form intricate, important and fragile ecosystems. Plastic pollution is destroying this by killing marine life, destroying habitats and leaching harmful chemicals and carcinogens into the water.
‘This not only limits the oceans’ ability to sustain our life on Earth, the toxins feed back into our lives, too.’
As part of this year’s challenge, Cal is taking part in various beach clean-ups along the way, including one in Cumbria on June 8, World oceans Day.
She’s using her Facebook page to encourage anyone who lives locally to come along.
She’s also hoping Mail readers inspired by her journey might show support by switching to a refillable water bottle like the ecofriendly klean kanteen she is carrying throughout her tour.
‘There’s an app called Refill which you can download onto your phone. Lots of shops, cafes and restaurants have signed up and it tells you where you can refill your water bottle for free,’ she says
With that, she paddles off into the distance, her blue bucket waiting to be filled with the next consignment of floating plastic.
For information about Cal’s journey, visit paddleagainstplastic.com. Details of the refill app available at www.refill.org.uk