Finding treasures at "The Cut"

On the final day of our Memorial Day weekend at the lake, we anticipated smaller crowds overall, so we all piled into the boat and headed for the sandy beach area known as "The Cut."

We could spot our destination at a great distance as we motored towards it. Silver bullets, and lights of many types and brands twinkled on the approaching sand bar.

Silver bullets as in Coors lights cans.

Lights as in Bud Lights, Miller Lites, and Amstel Lights.

Piles and piles of empty beer cans and bottles greeted our beachhead landing.

People are so disgusting and disrespectful. Some people even went through the trouble of putting their trash into plastic bags, but still left them on the beach area.

We found a semi-clean area a little ways down the beach and settled in. The girls swam, floated, played in the sand, while I fished with my trusty Sonic Rooster Tail. My wife and her folks treasure hunted along the shore for arrowheads, pieces of pottery, lures, and what not.

Non ill-gotten booty
C found an HP 5 megapixel digital camera floating in the water, along with a Motorola cell phone. Neither were functioning, but I did remove the battery from the cell phone (works fine in my wife's work cell phone). The digital camera was trashed, but it did have a 512 meg SD storage card which I removed, cleaned up and inserted into my storage card reader. It booted right up onto my desktop in iPhoto.

Score.

Alas, there were no photos on the SD card of families happily enjoying the lake, of dogs with bandanas tied around their necks, or of drunken coeds in various states of undress.

Either the freshwater bath "cleaned" it of images, or the owner lost the camera overboard before they had a chance to get some digital memories recorded. So, I reformatted it and plugged it into C's digital camera for an additional 1.5 hours of mpeg4 movies. Color her happy.

Party at "The Cut"
There must have been quite a party at "The Cut" the day before we got there, indicated by the number of single guys in boats and jetski's that came bombing into the area, only to turn around disappointed at the site of our solitary family among the empty beer cans and burnt out bonfires.

Sorry guys, no party here today...yet.

Sure enough, a boat full of young turks showed up, with the token bikini-clad girlfriend and token dog, who chose to don a doggie-visor instead of the neckerchief bandana.

They pulled in, stereo blaring, beers in their hands, whooping and hollering as only young Spring-Breakers (or Memorial Day breakers in this case) do.

We chuckled as they drunkenly stumbled out of the boat and into the water.

We started to packed up our gear as they pulled their cooler of beers onto the beach.

We stared in amazement as they pulled out and unfolded 40 gallon trash bags and began to pick up all the bottles and cans on the beach.

Wait, what was wrong with this picture. These young, party-animal, beach-going, sunburnt, beer-koozie carrying lakesters were cleaning up OTHER PEOPLE'S TRASH!

We all climbed in our boat and as we struggled to get ourselves pushed off the sand, one of them came over and gave us a push, saying, "that's all right mate, I got it for ya," with an unmistakably Aussie accent.

They came from the land down under to enjoy our shark-free lakes, drink our watered down beer, and clean up our good old American trash.

Take a hint, people. This world wasn't made for you to trash it up.

G'day mates.