MainCleanUp Day with the FRVS

Lots of rubbish along and on the Main – we're constantly confronted with it. Hardly a training session goes by without us fishing rubbish out of the Main and disposing of it in our bin. Hardly a day goes by without us first having to clear the grounds in front of the club of rubbish. We often find things and can't understand how people leave such things in our nature, carelessly or on purpose. It's very sad that the need for intact nature – without which a healthy life for all of us would be impossible – is apparently not recognised by many, or more than ignored.

Now and then we find bicycles or even electric scooters. The problem: we have to register the collection. All the more we're glad when we can take part in one of the action days of Cleanffm or MainCleanUp, where the collection of the bulky rubbish is arranged on the same day. So this year, on 9 September, we were out for our environment and our training waters. With a motorised work platform that we were kindly allowed to borrow from the Wasser-Sport-Club Kaiserlei, a 10-seater canoe, and active scramblers on land and the bank, we hauled a great deal of rubbish and scrap from the tightest corners, the densest thickets and along the rockiest shoreline.

The call to free our Main together of a little of the rubbish and scrap was followed especially by our young fellow athletes. Even those who can't come to training so regularly turned up punctually with us on Saturday to follow the MainCleanUp call together with numerous other water-sports clubs. At our Rudererdorf alone, over 300 kg of rubbish was collected.

All the electric scooters, bicycles and so on couldn't be weighed. We're glad we were able to free our Main of a little of the masses of rubbish, but we're very sad that we found so much within 3–4 hours.

We all very much wish that we'll be less successful at the next rubbish-collection campaigns – not because we can't recover the rubbish, but because there's much less of it. But this will probably remain a wish … our current reality, unfortunately, looks different.