Collection Report Jan 30, 2012

Monday, January 30, 11:30AM. Bay View beach, Saco, ME. Low tide. Blue skies, mild wind from the west to east, maybe gusts to 20 mph.

Another week of weak tides and no fresh seaweed washed in. But there -was- a wrack line, mostly made up of land-based plant matter. And noticeable bits of plastic in the mix.

What happened to all the fresh sand dumped onshore the week before? It all slumped down to the terrace -- a slow-motion mudslide.

Quicksand a foot deep,
literally mush underfoot

Clearly, the beach "knew" that this batch of fresh sand didn't belong. It didn't fit or mesh into the rest of the beach. Instead, the beach sloughed it off, and each tide eroded more of it back out to sea. Sometimes leaving depressions or bowls where the scour was the strongest.

More interesting from a flotsam aspect is that, this week, stuff was actually left behind -- or exposed by the erosion. Zone N:

65 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (4 asphalt, 1 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 27
• Fishing misc.: 7 (rope, clawband, shotgun shell wadding, 4 trap vinyl coating scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (2 bottlecaps, two tear-off tops)
• Food-related metal/glass: 5 (can bottom, 4 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (rubberband, silk flower, PVC pipe scrap, 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
• Paper/wood: 3
• Misc./unique: 2 (tiny scrap of yarn, sharp metal offcut)

Crumpled up on the sand was a nice cautionary tale.

A receipt from Fayetteville, NC!  

Obviously this didn't wash in; it came out of a very local pocket. A good reminder not to jump to conclusions about where something came from without good evidence. (See recent reports of Japanese tsunami debris already reaching US west coast.)

Zone S:

23 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (asphalt, brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12
• Fishing misc.: 2 (trap vinyl coating scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (tiny scrap of can, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 3 (leather offcuts)

By the time I left, the winds had picked up. The dry wrackline was quickly blowing down to the terrace.

To be washed away.

Where will it wash up next? And what will wash up with it?

(Un)Collection Report, Jan 23, 2012

Once again, playing catchup! So, a return back to an interesting late January at Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. 1/23, 1:00PM, about 2 hours after high tide.

This day brought two things that had been missing from Saco Bay for months:

Snow

and

Energy!

Wild times at Bay View. One of the three washed-in traps had readable tags, the most recent being 2007. Would love to know its 4+ year story. Same with this mangled beast:

Fisherman's boot

That boot wasn't lost yesterday.

Yet for all the energy on display, the angry waves at first seemed to have left little else behind.

Blank slate

Other than the traps & boot (which lay north of my collection zones), there was nothing to see. It took a little (literal) digging, but I found out why.

Topsy-turvy

Scraping down from six inches to (in places) over a foot and a half, I uncovered fresh, buried snow from the week's snowstorm. After the snows, the sea dumped countless tons of heavy, gritty sand as a blanket. Burying everything. A pretty major shore-sculpting event, following on from the rocky deposits left the week before. Quite strange -- the weather had been blustery, but enough to bring up that kind of sand?

The flipside is, sand is pretty much all that got left, at least on the surface. Maybe plastics were mixed in. But there was no way to dig through everything to find it. So this trip was a very fast, and very unsatisfying, collection.

Zone N:

10 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 7
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (baggie, bandaid)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Otherwise known as: nothing.

Zone S:

11 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 5
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, vinyl trap coating)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (ketchup wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (vinyl siding scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Otherwise known as: still nothing.

I don't know where the sand from this big wash-in came from. Whether it was carried in suspension by a choppy sea for miles, or dredged up from the terrace line right here at Bay View. All I know is that this was a sand week. Some weeks are vinyl, some polyethylene, some asphalt, some shell, some seaweed. This was just gritty, heavy, pure sand.


So, again, oceans are amazing things. And you never visit the same beach twice.

Collection Report Jan 16-17, 2011

January 16, 2012. 11:35AM, Bay View beach, Saco, Maine, just after high-tide. Winter finally arrived, about two months late for this part of the world. And the previous week had seen some good stormy weather to boot. At about 20 degrees F, "layering" was the word of the day.

On the foreshore, the snow was gone, but a sheet of ice held fresh wrackline -- with its tag-alongs -- in its grip.

This marks the first of a remarkable few weeks at the beach. Not necessarily for the flotsam washed up, but for how shorelines work in winter. Take a look at this pebbly wasteland at the edge of the low-tide terrace.

It turns out, this isn't the usual rocky substrate, revealed by a week of erosion. It's the opposite. Under these pebbles the old sand was one big block of ice, locked firmly in place by winter's descent. All of this rocky debris was hurled violently on top of the old sand layer. By the kind of churning sea that was able to cast offshore oddities like this high up the slope.

Tossed it back in, maybe still alive

Thousands of tube-worm casts
amid the rock & shell

The sea made a bed of offshore flotsam and left it high & dry once the tide receded. I even found a pebble that was completely encrusted with barnacles. These rocks aren't local substrate; they're seafloor rocks (and even one oyster shell -- my first at Bayview) from out beyond the tide line that the previous week's weather hurled up.

Proof that when you freeze a shoreline, and then throw in a nice churning storm in the mix, you've very much changed the game. Look also at how the ocean left the signature of her wave energy in the pebbles.

What an amazing world.

Anyway, for this day, the ice along the wrack sealed much of the plastic. I got what I could, then returned at low tide on the 17th to collect what had thawed.

So, for Zone N:

66 finds:

• Building materials: 16 (10 brick, 2 asphalt, 4 tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3
• Fishing misc.: 14 (11 lobster trap vinyl coating scraps, 1 trap scrap, 2 bumpers)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (bottle cap o-ring)
• Food-related metal/glass: 24 (bottlecap, 23 seaglass!)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 3 (napkin scraps)
• Misc./unique: 0

Almost everything that came up -- and stayed up -- was heavy or dense or friction-y. Tile, brick, sharp snaggy shards of lobster trap vinyl. Light, blowy plastics were limited to 3 tiny flecks of foam that got tangled into the wrack. And look at this, 23 sea glass, that's a record.

Just a wild week that brought up stuff from very unusual places on the seabed.

Here's Zone S:

45 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (7 brick, 1 asphalt, 1 tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 7 (4 trap vinyl coatings, 1 bumper, 2 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (bottlecap o-rings)
• Food-related metal/glass: 11 (1 can scrap, 1 pulltab, 2 bottlecaps, 7 seaglass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 6 (3 scraps <1", tieback, rubberband, carabiner?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 5 (leather sole, leather punchout, 2 rag scraps, buried fencing)

The same story here as Zone N. Heavy stuff, weird stuff. Seafloor stuff. Including this bizarre frozen arachnid...

...which turned out to be mangled chainlink fencing.

So a week not notable for how much washed in, but for what it was and where it came from. The sudden onset of winter froze the beach in place. And that seems to have set in motion many weeks of odd behavior -- which I've been able to catalog.

Stay tuned!

It's a Small World After All

Plastic. Bought locally. Acting globally.

Here's Mexico, Denmark, Oman, Serbia, India, and Cyprus.

Here's the USA west coast, England, USA east coast, Norway, Bali, and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

This is Lebanon, the Atlantic island of Cape Verde, Tanzania, Australia, China, and Peru.

This list could cycle through every nation, every province, every state, every city. In the entire world. Everywhere that plastic has reached -- including many deserted lands where it shouldn't have reached -- the world has been changed.

Maybe in some parts of the world we can still ignore it, or pretend it's not a problem, or that it'll just go away.

But who's kidding -- There is no "away."

So what do we do? Simple. We fix it. Or we drown in it.

Transatlantic Connections - Part I: Lobster Trap Tags

After nearly two years, there's plenty I'm still learning. But one thing is sure. The same oceans that divide us, connect us. In the Pacific, the currents tie East to West and West to East. The Atlantic, thanks to the Gulf Stream, is more of a one-way street, North America ---> Europe.

Plastics from my part of the world can make the 3,000-mile crossing unscathed, washing up on Irish & British shores. Many bear marks that identify what they were, where they came from, and even when. Each is a time capsule and a fabulous source of information, and stories. If one knows what to look for!

So here's the first in a series of pages dedicated to long-distance plastic debris. Stuff that could start in the Gulf of Maine, wash up on an Irish or British beach, and be found.

Lobster Trap Tags

Gulf of Maine lobster trap tags are a common find on beaches in Maine. And, it turns out, far from Maine. Lobstering is an enormous & highly regulated local industry. By law, all lobster traps must have one of these colorful little strips attached to it.

Trap tags are color-coded by year. The tags above are the colors used in Maine from 1997 (top) through 2010 (bottom).

Each tag is stamped with owner's license, federal fishing zone, trap #, state/province, year, and region. So, for example, the green one is 6841 A1 0789 ME 09 Z:G EEZ. 6841 is the owner's license; A1 is the national region (basically coastal Maine); 0789 is the trap number; ME 09 is Maine 2009 season; Z:G is Maine's "G" zone (the most southwesterly; with A being the most northeasterly); and EEZ meaning the trap can be set out in deeper water several miles offshore.

(Tags from other states & Canada use varied color schemes. Also, Maine has some anomalies. The bottom tag says "NC," which means non-commercial -- this is a recreational fisherman who's allowed to have only 5 pots in the water at one time.)

In season, there can be several million lobster traps in the water. Tags break free from traps all the time. They're buoyant, and many find & ride the Gulf Stream to Ireland and the UK. Rik Bennett was combing his beach in Wales in 2010 when he stumbled upon this one:

Not bad for 3 years at sea

More recently, Andy Goodall from Newquay, Cornwall, UK discovered this Newfoundland, Canada specimen in December 2011:

Stunning shape for maybe 12 years at sea!

And last but not least, an amazing story of connections across 3,000 miles and 20 years. Rosemary Hill lives Waterville, County Kerry, Ireland. Walking the beach last year, she stumbled upon a tag. Not the colorful annual band, but a separate permanent tag that IDs the owner more thoroughly.

On a hunch, she decided to see if she could find the owner. And she did, through his son's FaceBook page. This tag, belonging to a Massachusetts fisherman, was on a trap lost in the "Perfect Storm" of 1991! After an incredible journey, it washed up on Irish shores. And a transatlantic connection was formed, reported in both European and American newspapers.

Plastic is forever. And that's bad news. But if it's out there in the ocean already, and it has stories to tell, isn't it nice to be able to tell them? Keep your eyes open; you never know what you may find!

Collection Report Jan 9, 2012

Monday, January 9, 2:30PM. Bright sun. Mild offshore breeze, chill in the air. 3 hrs after high-tide.

If you can call it a high-tide. This was the weakest tide I've ever seen at Bay View in 1 1/2 years of wandering it. Unsurprisingly, with no energy, no tides, and offshore winds, little washed up again. Actually, less than little.

Zone N:

12 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (4 brick, 1 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 1
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (baggie - not shown, black tape, 2 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Zone S:

6 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (2 asphalt, 3 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (glass bottle scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Take away the asphalt & brick, and there's nothing. On a hunch, I took a walk about 1/5 mile farther south than the southern edge of Zone S. This is an area that I've never collected, but have always anecdotally noted junk lying amid its wrack. This day? Nothing. Not one speck of seaweed or manmade debris. Not even a cigarette butt. Current conditions have pushed & blown everything that was on the sand back into the blue and kept more from washing up.

The perfect culmination of six weeks of truly "bizarre weather," as a NOAA oceanographer I'm in touch with has called it. By the end of the first week in January 2012, over 1000 all-time January heat records had broken. The jet stream, which usually dips deeply into the US from Canada, spent week after week riding high up in Canada. Could I be seeing a small part of the bigger story here on my little stretch of beach?

Anyway. Weirdness. But fun to be seeing it & adding it to the record.

Collection Report Jan 2, 2012

Happy January. January 2, 11:30AM.

The new year picked up where December left off. Ridiculously warm, sunny, busy, and not at all winter-like. And the coastal weirdness continued as well --  a weird flux of dead seas, dogwalkers, offshore winds, seafloor rocks/shells, and almost zero surface flotsam of any kind.

One of the few bits of debris this week; the "wrackline" is just
dried reeds blown down from the dunes

Straight into it. Zone N:

35 finds:

• Building materials: 12 (5 asphalt, 5 brick, 1 tile, 1 roof shingle)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 3 (rope scrap, trap runner -- put in trash at beach, trap bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (straw wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (3 cap scraps, bottlecap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (o-ring, baggie scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 5 (3 cigarettes, 2 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 1 (wood chunk)
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 leather shoe soles, rubber scrap)

Zone S:

15 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (3 asphalt, 1 concrete)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rope scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (rubber glove)

The dream continues.