What a beautiful day it was today for the Chilliwack/Vedder River Cleanup Coalition to celebrate BC Rivers Day at Thompson Park near the shore of our beautiful jewel of a river, the Chilliwack River.
We were honoured to have Mark Angelo who started BC Rivers Day on the Thompson River 25 years ago attend our event. Also Barry Penner the Environment Minister, MLA John van Dogen, and City of Chilliwack mayor Clint Hames took part. It was good to see Barry go out and do some cleanup of the river as well. I heard him comment how bad the area he went to was, this will help us in the future I hope tighten up our littering laws and get some teeth into them. We will be meeting in the near future with him to discusss this I am sure.
We had some great displays, prize draws and a excellent lunch as well, althought we were disappointed we could not do a fish BBQ like last year because the fish had to be inspected and we were not prepared to use farmed salmon etc. from a store, but that is another story.
We were a bit disappointed in the turnout as it was down a bit from last year but we must have had close to 150 take in the proceedings with a good number of them taking part in the actual cleanup. With this number of volunteers we were able to get a lot of debris off the river bank.
Rodney will provide some pictures of the day and of one of the dumpsters close to full of garbage.
FWR was well represented as was some other fishing forums. I will not mention who was there from FWR as I could miss some but I am sure Rodney will slip them in with his report. I hope others that did attend will add some remarks as well of the day.
Thanks from the CVRCC directors to all that could attend and I hope more will be able to take in the next cleanup in January 2006.