Collection Report Oct 17, 2011

Monday October 17, 12:15PM, about two hours before high tide. This compressed week -- only 5 days since the last collection -- had started drizzly, and ended windy. In fact, on the 17th it was actually quite gusty, with winds blowing from the west, offshore.

All of which led to a beach so uninteresting that I forgot even to take a picture of it!

I did find some debris, but much of it seems to have been tossed up earlier in the month, maybe buried under sand until the rains & winds revealed it. So, Zone N:

57 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 18
• Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope bits, shotgun shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (food wrapper, 2 straw wrappers, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (foil wrappers)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (2 balloons, marker, marker cap, rubber foot)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 21
• Paper/wood: 2 (paper scraps)
• Misc./unique: 2 (thread, glass stone)

The big thing(s) of note?

It doesn't really matter where these started. Just where they ended up.

Over to Zone S:

26 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 10
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope twine, vinyl trap scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (bottle scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (bits of cord)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 11
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Take away the cigarettes and the styrofoam and you've taken away 2/3 of the week's debris. Hopefully the new Bait Tank cigarette butt bin will help with the former. In the few days it had been there, it was already gaining some notice. In fact, there were 3 times as many cigarette butts in the bin as on the parking lot asphalt! Early days and small gains. But real gains.