Sailors Creek CIC - Support Our Core Projects

In 2023 we hope to raise money to support these ongoing core projects in our work at Sailors Creek:

1) The Creekside Clean Up - Cleaning up rubbish, processing it and disposing of the unrecyclable waste is expensive business.  We find the most costly items to dispose of and the least recyclable are the broken up GRP boats and pontoons that have found their way to the creek.  

At present there is no affordable way for end of life boats to be processed in the UK and the final owners of these boats on the whole do not have the capacity or resources to have them recycled at the facilities that are available, which are few and far between.  

So they end up washed up in creeks and on beaches across the country and left to disintegrate.  

It is community organisations like ours that are left to foot the bill.

We need financial support for the following:

• Disposing of wrecks through official waste transfer channels
• Disposing of all sizes of unrecyclable items using skips

2) Establishing the Forest Garden - Forest Gardening is a really interesting way of growing food.  On our 2.4ha of land we plan to establish a community forest garden for the benefit of the Sailors Creek community and beyond.  Food forests are made up of vertical layers - from overstory trees down to rhizomes - and guilds. Guilds are clusters of symbiotic plants, like a small tribe of plants, that support each other by offering mineral accumulation, insect control, nitrogen fixing and ground cover.  In time the Sailors Creek forest garden will be an abundant source of food security education but more importantly fresh fruit, and nuts and vegetables for the local community.

We need financial support for the following:

• Building our stock of perennial guild species for each fruit or nut tree that we planted in 2022.

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Here is our story so far:

Since September 2021 Sailors Creek CIC has been working on the galvanising of a volunteer community for the clearance of the shoreline at Sailors Creek, the galvanising of a volunteer community for the creation and care of a forest garden and pathways within an established brash and woodland ecosystem adjacent to Sailors Creek, and the CIC has been working on the visibility of the CIC’s work and story online.  

There is now a regularly updated website (sailorscreekcic.org), an Instagram page (@sailorscreekcic_penrynriver) and a regular newsletter and blog sent to subscribers and members.  By the end of September 2022 Sailors Creek CIC had 70 paying members of the CIC. Membership is available through the website or can be facilitated any number of ways for maximum accessibility. Members and subscribers of the CIC are found both locally and nationally, over 100 people have subscribed to our newsletters and blogs.  

As the creek has been cleared, approximately 5 tonnes of rubbish until September 2022, paid beach moorings have slowly become available. The moorings are of a basic nature.  Mooring traffic during the year of September 2021 to September 2022 included:

• one boat over-wintering in transit to Europe; 
• two vessels abandoned, identified and sold to the CIC;
• one vessel bought by the CIC;
• six new boats arrived in the financial year.

Volunteers and members helped with the planting of almost 200 trees and bushes in the late winter of 2022.  This was demanding work and involved wrestling with bramble, gorse, blackthorn.  An eco beehive (treehive) was purchased and attached to one of the large 300-year-old Oaks, it was swarmed very quickly, and the community take great interest in it.

Other big news from 2022:

• A rigorous canvas shelter was purchased for volunteers and members to take shelter from the elements.  It will be used for future workshops and activities.
• A community BioArtBlitz! was held in May 2022 covering 24hours of art and ecology in the area of Sailors Creek with the kind support of representatives from BTO and Budding Nature CIC.
• Regular water testing of the creek in association with Westcountry Rivers Trust Citizen Science Initiative has been a success and continues.
• Sailors Creek CIC held its first AGM in April 2022 at the Sailing Club in Flushing with open invites to all members and supporters.