What do legislators, trash and unicorns have in common?
Day 6 of Paddle Georgia finds the paddle participants on the river with invited professionals and Georgia legislators. This popular day had professionals from Sierra Club, 
100 Miles, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and Josh Findlay from US Reps Jody Hice’s office. The new “fresh” paddlers gave all of us an opportunity to share “our” river with them and talk about the beautiful journey we have been on this week.
Yes, it feels like we know this river. We have bumped and shimmied and danced around her trees. We have bathed in her cool, clear amber water. We have lounged on her many large, CLEAN, sugar sandbars. I think I can speak for many a paddler who is very sad to see this journey coming to the end and promise to come back.
CLEAN, yes in caps… the cleanest river I
have ever been on…period. Being the “Trash Queen” I guess I can be considered sort of an expert. Today, Thursday, is our Paddle Georgia river trash cleanup. I was so fortunate to have past PG participant Christine Kirkland from Effingham County Schools contact me and offer to help me with our cleanup months ago.
Not only did she and fellow teacher Lauren Osborne arrange for the dumpster, they also made sure we had a party! The generous people of Effingham County thanked the PG paddlers with food, cold drinks, T-shirts and much merriment. Even in this clean river we managed to bring in around 1,500lbs of river trash.
O yeah….Unicorns… yes unicorns. There has been a unicorn appearing on the side of the river on various paddling days. I included a picture, and just for the record I had absolutely nothing to do with this appearance.
Lots of people have seen it, and yes it is alive, yes it is kind of silly, and maybe even a little weird. But when I first saw it, just for a split second, I believed it was magic. The Ogeechee can do that.
Bonny Putney, Georgia River Network Board Member
Paddle Georgia, A Project of Georgia River Network - Weblog 