Bobbing in the Pacific Ocean is flotsom and jetsam from around the world, some of it mindlessly bound for Whidbey Island.

Ocean currents bring the stuff down the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into Puget Sound, where pristine beaches can turn into impromptu garbage dumps over night when conditions are right.

That’s why beach cleaning on Whidbey is an endless job, like sweeping a floor made of dirt. There’s always more flotsam and jetsam coming our way.

It’s Cheryl May’s job to see that the material is picked up and disposed of properly, and already this spring she has crews covering a dozen Island County beaches, making sure they’re presentable to the coming throngs of tourists and beach-loving locals.

The last weekend of March, volunteers from Compass Health picked up 350 pounds of seafaring litter at Ebey’s Landing, and that wasn’t a particularly impressive total.

“On some weekends I might get a ton,” said May, who has been Island County’s beach litter project coordinator for the past seven years. Working with grants from the state Department of Ecology, she is able to pay for beach trash disposal at the county landfill.

Volunteers do the litter pickup. Many are part of the adopt-a-beach program, in which people from a business, Navy squadron, non-profit group or just a few friends or family members agree to keep a stretch of beach clean by picking up litter at least four times a year.

“I provide the gloves, bags and education,” May said. She also places a sign on the beach saying who adopted it.

May said the volunteers make a big difference, but cleaning a beach four times a year is not enough. “They need much, much, more than that,” she said. That’s why there’s an endless need for volunteers, as she likes to keep the beaches as clean as possible.

The beach at Fort Casey State Park is “adopted,” as May describes it, but it’s still in need of cleaning. “I could take a ton of trash off there every weekend,” she said. “It just washes up.” Much of the trash originates with the huge ships that ply Admiralty Inlet, some of which dump their junk at sea. “Every group is surprised by what’s out there,” May said.

“There’s plastic litter all over the planet.”

May is enthusiastic about the educational aspects of beach cleanup. Beach adopters inventory the type of trash they recover and send the information to an Ocean Conservancy worldwide database in Florida. “It teaches students skills for extrapolating data,” she said. Kids also enjoy finding “drift cards” set free on the waves by researchers tracking current patterns. These cards show a lot of Whidbey’s garbage drifts over from the Seattle area, May said.

Besides the adopt-a-beach program, May regularly announces beach cleanup days and has gloves and bags ready for whoever shows up. The News-Times prints these cleanup days on a regular basis. Anyone interested in volunteering to keep Whidbey’s beaches clean should call Cheryl May at 678-4100 or e-mail cmay@whidbey.com.