IT ALL HEADS TO THE OCEAN THOUSANDS OF CALIFORNIANS PARTICIPATE IN ANNUAL COASTAL CLEANUP DAY.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

Thousands of volunteers came out to Southern California's beaches, creeks and riverbeds Saturday for the 18th annual Coastal Cleanup Day.

The volunteers gathered at beaches in Los Angeles and Ventura counties and at a number of inland waterways, including Malibu Creek and the Arroyo Conejo Creek in Thousand Oaks.

Since the program started in 1985, more than 506,000 California volunteers have removed more than 7.5 million pounds of debris from the state's shorelines and coastal areas, officials said. The effort is coordinated with similar cleanup efforts around the world.

Organizers said that in order to clean up the beaches, volunteers have to begin along the inland waterways that feed into the ocean. Data from past cleanups has shown that more than 60 percent of the debris collected on Coastal Cleanup Day originates from inland sources, the organizers said.

``We try to reach as far inland as possible on Coastal Cleanup Day, in order to stop trash where it starts,'' said Even Schwartz, statewide outreach coordinator for the California Coastal Commission.

Organizers said that statewide on Saturday, at least 36,350 volunteers collected 511,644 pounds of trash and an additional 105,241 pounds of recyclables.

Among the more unusual finds was the sole of a hobnail boot believed to be from the Civil War era discovered in Marin County. In Nevada County on the Yuba River, an old miner's lunch pail was found.

Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill Friday allocating roughly $46 million for beach cleanups.

``You'll find cleanups on every major waterway coming out of the Sierras,'' Schwartz said. ``We're cleaning up places we've never cleaned before.''

In Southern California, hundreds of people turned out Saturday along waterways in inland Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

In the city of Compton, about 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles, volunteers pulled trash from the concrete-lined Compton Creek.

Diana Gutierrez, 17, was among the nearly 100 volunteers who waded into the murky water, where crawfish somehow survive among the debris.

``So far we've found knives, diapers, toys and dirty clothes, and a lot of broken glass,'' she said. ``They say all this stuff is going to go into the ocean, and we don't want that to happen.''

Still, getting people out to rivers and smaller waterways is a tougher sell than a day at the beach.

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Carolyn Wall leaps a portion of Arroyo Conejo Creek after clearing debris in Borchard Community Park in Thousand Oaks, during the annual Coastal Cleanup.

Joe Binoya/Special to the Daily News