A La-Z-Boy recliner, an exercise bike and a felon’s ankle monitor are among the bizarre things washing up on our beaches.
“We find a lot of interesting items each week and we’re always curious as to how they ended up there,” Matthew Crosta, founder of the volunteer organization Long Beach Clean Up, told The Post.
“That La-Z-Boy recliner really had the best sunset on the entire beach.”
Long Beach Cleanup, which meets from March to November, was launched in the summer of 2020 by Crosta, a Long Beach, Long Island native, whose mission was to “to show people that volunteering isn’t a chore and can actually be fun.”
Besides the recliner, Crosta was surprised by an exercise bike abandoned in the sand.
“We don’t find out the stories behind them, because they just kind of pop up some mornings, but I’m sure it’s just kids having fun,” he said.
The group also stumbles upon “a handful” of messages in a bottle each year.
Recently, they came across a letter that had traveled to the Nassau County beach from the Garden State in just three days.
“We all opened it together and it was from someone in New Jersey and it was from three days earlier,” Crosta said. “So that fact was like, ‘Wow, it made it here already?’”
During their busy summer season, the group hits the sand weekly at 6:30 p.m. to tidy up after brazen beachgoers, who have left everything from a head of broccoli to half of a bowling ball behind.
Last year, Crosta’s crew removed a staggering 2,616 pounds of trash.
So far this year, they have cleaned up 1,855 pounds, including one item that raised some eyebrows — a snipped-off ankle monitor.
“That was for someone that shouldn’t have been taking that off,” he said.
