A HUGE fishing net which drifted on to Castle Beach has been removed by a team of volunteers.

The net, estimated to be around 25 metres by 15 metres, came ashore on Christmas Eve, when Plastic Free Falmouth's Kirstie Mifsud was alerted to it by Robin Markland and his son River.

Robin said: "It literally weighed a ton but managed to drag it over the rocks. The hardest bit was dealing with it snagging on the rocks continuously.

"The tide came in just after so the environment is lucky we were there. We got it out of the sea and dragged it over to a safe place until a team of people could remove it. So pleased that it will be recycled into something nice."

Kirstie said: "We couldn't really do anything about it on Christmas Eve because everyone was so busy, but we were able to get a team together on December 27 to cut it into smaller pieces so it could be taken away.

"The net had been seen in the bay a few days before it landed on Castle Beach, but it was very heavy and it took around ten of us to handle it.

The net was cut and cleaned of seaweed, then wrapped into manageable bundles. It was then taken by van to our local storage in Penryn with Plastic Oceanic, owned by town councillor Dan Edwards.

The net will then be transported with other beach clean waste to a storage unit in Bodmin as part of the Ocean Recovery Project, then cleaned, chopped, melted and then put into moulds by Rob Thompson at Odyssey Innovation Ltd which will become kayaks.

This pictures only show half of the net, as much of it had already been cut away.