The first thing you notice on a Vineyard beach the morning after a busy weekend is everything the tide didn’t take back: bottle caps pressed into the sand, the torn corner of a chip bag. Last summer I started paying closer attention to beach debris when I signed up as a volunteer with Beach BeFrienders MV.
As a competitive sailor and a senior sailing instructor at a local yacht club, I already spend most of my summer on the water. But Beach BeFrienders got me to look hard at the water I sail in and the edge of it — the place where the ocean hands our stuff back to us.
If you haven’t come across them, Beach BeFrienders, which recently branched out from the Vineyard Conservation Society, is a volunteer effort to keep the Island’s beaches clean and to look out for the creatures that depend on them. On the morning of July 5 (when the beaches take the worst of it), a couple of volunteers I had never met were generous enough to pick me up early and drive me out to a cleanup at State Beach. Once there we put our upcycled beach cleanup bags to good use, and although we were strangers, and not of the same generation, we had the shared interest of protecting our shorelines and had fun.
Last summer I organized a beach cleanup kit assembly event, where we put together cleanup kits so anyone heading down to the sand could pick up more than just their own trash. I also spent some time at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair with the Beach BeFrienders trash truck, which turns out to be a surprisingly fun way to start conversations about waste with people, as we make arts and crafts together. And this past weekend, I hosted two days of beach cleanup kit making near the Oak Bluffs harbormaster station.
Something I couldn’t help but notice is that, while we had a good turn-out of kids this past weekend helping to make cleanup kits, the volunteers and those who express interest are mostly a generation or two older than me, or little kids dragged along by a parent. The middle is missing. High school and college students are the ones on these beaches all summer, and we’re the ones who will inherit them. So, I’ll make a friendly challenge to my peers: give one morning to a beach which you will be lying on anyway, and bring a friend. It’s a couple of hours, and don’t worry, the company is good.
I’ve worried about the environment since I was a little kid. I can still remember telling my mom that skiing probably wouldn’t be a sport I’d get to share with my own kids someday because by then the snow would be gone. This year, after a big school event, I watched a teacher quietly pull a garbage bag out of his backpack and clean up what the students had left behind. No announcement, no lecture, just doing it. That stuck with me: how careless people can be with a shared space, and how one person can simply decide to take care of it anyway.
But knowing something and doing something about it are different. The push to actually build something came from two very physical experiences: bending down to pick up other people’s trash and the gloves on my own hands. Typical sailing gloves don’t give me the tight grip I need, so like a lot of racers I end up sailing in gardening gloves. They have great grip but get worn out so quickly, they’re basically single-use, and I finish regattas with crazy blisters. If you multiply all my thrown-out gloves by every sailor, you get a small mountain of thrown-away gloves.
So, I started thinking about a better one, and now I’ve shifted to designing it: a sailing glove that actually grips, protects your hands and is still built intentionally to go easy on the water it’s used on. I’m taking chemistry this coming school year in part to understand the materials well enough to have conversations with manufacturers. I think about the glove the way I think about a wind shift, as a problem with a real, physical answer: how to get the most friction where the line runs, how to spread force across the hand so it doesn’t tear you up, how to balance durability against environmental impact. The glove is something I’m still developing, not a product I’m selling. It’s a project my experience in regattas and beach cleanups set in motion.
That’s the throughline I didn’t expect when I showed up two summers ago on the Vineyard. Out racing, physics doesn’t negotiate; the boat rewards the sailor who respects it and punishes the one who cuts corners. The ocean works the same way. If you care about the water you sail on, you don’t just complain about the litter, you pick it up. And when you can, you design the gear and the habits that make the responsible choice the easy one.
Every beach, it turns out, deserves a friend. So does every stretch of water we’re lucky enough to race across.
Everett Royall lives in Puerto Rico. He will be a senior at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut.
This article appears in August 14, 2026.
Bravo Everett!
May your enthusiasm and outlook spread like ripples through your peer group and beyond! Yours is the vision we all need to share.
Good luck with your glove design and keep reaching out with your very good writing skills.
Best of luck to you.
Great initiative. But it’s not just beaches.
Years ago, I used to take a break from work in OB and drive out Beach Rd. to the first bridge, park and go on a quick walk along the bike path before heading back to work. What should have been a pleasant walk was diminished by all the trash that had been thrown from passing cars festooning the rosa rugosa.
It was made up mostly of nip bottles and scratch tickets.