Just one week until Surfrider Foundation South Texas Chapter and Barefoot Wine's 5th Beach Rescue Project with the City of South Padre Island this Saturday, May 19th from 9AM-3PM! This has been an outstanding partnership since we first won an online contest in 2008 to get Barefoot Wine to start sponsoring our efforts and always proves to be a great event raising awareness about the importance of naturally protecting and preserving our local beaches and then rewarding the Volunteers with a celebration of our annual dunes restoration efforts with a celebration sponsored by Barefoot Wine that provides complimentary food and wine after the planting along with live music! Spoiler alert; food with be very scrumptious with Ahi Tuna, Crab Cakes and Boiled Shrimp!
All the event details are in the above flyer and you can RSVP for the day here. We would like to thank the Padre Island Brewing Company and local reggae rockers Junbug for once again hosting and playing the celebration! Mark at the Brew Pub and Junior Valdez and John-Paul Fedigan with Junbug have been outstanding supporters of the Surfrider Foundation's efforts to accomplish our mission of the protection and preservation of our oceans, waves and beaches for the enjoyment of all people!
This year's event will cap off the 2011/2012 Dune Restoration Planting Season by planting 10,000 bitter panicum and sea oat plants in a critically eroding area of the City Beaches and give them the relative calm summer months to establish and thrive in order to start building natural beach and property protection along with habitat for our flora and fauns in the form of dunes! The celebration will commemorate both this year's dune restoration efforts and the City of South Padre Island being awarded a $150,000 grant ($90,000 from GLO and $60,000 in in-kind match in form of volunteer hours) that will provide for 180,000 plants and 14 plantings for the 2012/2013 season. This grant more than triples the resources that the City has been able to acquire in the past and a lot of it has to do with the volunteer hours our awesome cadre of planters from such great organizations and schools as the Texas Master Naturalists, Keep SPI Beautiful, UTB, UTPA, STC, Texas A&M and local high schools have put in!
Here is a small recap of what Surfrider Foundation, the City of South Padre Island and those volunteers have been able to accomplish in just the past 2 years alone.
- Approximately 79,000 plants in the ground
- Approximately 160,000 square feet of new dunes created or enhanced
- $50,000 in savings to the City of South Padre Island's Beach Maintenance Fund in the 2010/2011 alone!
The Surfrider Foundation South Texas Chapter, Barefoot Wine and the City of South Padre Island would very much like to thank everyone who has participated in this program and look forward to seeing y'all this Saturday for the Barefeoot Wine Beach Rescue Project and Celebration!
