BOCA RATON — A day after Sunday’s annual Boca Bash, Brook Crist took to Lake Boca for a day of “treasure hunting,” as she likes to call it.
The treasure? The dozens of gallons of garbage left behind in the ocean by this year’s boaters at the bash, the once-a-year water party held on the last Sunday in April in Boca Raton.
Crist, of Pompano Beach, was at the event. But not in the way most others were.
She drove there to fly her drone overhead to capture footage of the water from above, to compare it to her footage from the next day, when she’d fly the drone again. She’s since uploaded a vlog of Monday’s search, featuring both clips.
“There were hundreds of boats, and like thousands of people anchored everywhere,” Crist said. “The next day, when we went back to clean it up, there were maybe, max, 10 to 12 boats.”
Boca Bash cleanup featured on vloggers’ YouTube pages
For the last five years, Crist and her now-husband, Viktor Hluben, have cleaned, or “treasure hunted” in, the lake after the bash.
The pair are content creators with social-media pages dedicated to fishing, diving, cooking and life outside. Crist has more than 295,000 subscribers on her YouTube page, Brook Crist Outdoors, and Viktor, Landshark Outdoors, has more than 725,000.
“Boca is very local to me,” Crist said. “It’s basically our local sandbar. “So as far as cleaning up, I feel like I’m cleaning up my local waters.”
Each time she and Hluben go, she said, there are always others there hunting for treasure. But rarely is there ever anybody helping clean up the trash.
“We basically just go wanting to help clean up our environment, because there is a lot of trash after that event,” Crist said. “Hopefully, we can make a little dent in it.”
This year, Crist’s friend joined them. With masks, snorkels and fins on, and with mesh bags in hand, the trio collected 10 gallons of garbage.
“We went around just picking up all the trash that we could find,” Crist said.
Mostly, it was bottles and cans. But more than 10 sunglasses, about two dozen e-cigarettes and a cellphone made the cut, too. Beaded necklaces in an assortment of colors and a dollar bill topped the piles of trash.
“I always like to call it treasure hunting, but as far as treasures go, there are not many to be found,” Crist said.
‘Treasure hunters’ glad Boca Bash trash-dumping video has gone viral
The amount of trash picked up on Monday was typical, she said. Every year, she and Hluben pick up anywhere from two to three 5-gallon buckets of garbage left behind.
But this year, Lake Boca’s in the spotlight after a video posted online by a group known as Wavy Boats, showing a group of boaters dumping two cans full of trash into the ocean, went viral. The video, posted on Monday, has since been featured on national television news shows and in international media reports.
Two teenagers turned themselves into FWC authorities on Friday. The parents of one of them issued an apology through a spokesperson during the weekend, saying the family was “extremely saddened” by the incident and urging that the teens be given community service as a punishment to make the dumping “a teachable moment.”
“It’s very disturbing and disgusting to see that people would do something like that,” Crist said. “The reality of it is that that happens every year. They just happened to actually get filmed doing it, but the amount of trash that is dumped there every single year is just outrageous.”
But Crist is glad the video has gone viral, she said.
“It’s making a lot of people very aware,” Crist said. “And I hope that it makes people think twice again before they do something like this, because it does happen every year.”
The two teens filmed dumping trash in the video uploaded by Wavy Boats have turned themselves into authorities, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesperson said Friday.
“The illegal dumping of trash in our marine environment is a serious crime, and we worked closely with the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office to determine appropriate charges,” FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto said.
“Callous disregard for Florida’s environment will not be tolerated. This is a teaching moment for all those involved — Florida’s natural resources are precious, and we should all do our part to protect them.”
Jasmine Fernández is a journalist covering Delray Beach and Boca Raton for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at [email protected] and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @jasminefernandz. Help support our work. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Boca Bash 2024: YouTubers ‘treasure hunt’ for trash dumped in lake
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