Thursday, September 20, 2012. 8:45AM. Greetings, from a lingering Maine summer.
Sun-kissed beach roses and other wildflowers greeted me this morning. Low tide, deserted shores, and clean bright skies:
A beautiful morning.
Over the previous few days big storms and huge winds had come through. The sand "cliffs" high on the foreshore were knocked and dragged back over. Fresh wrack ripped from the cove's basin lay scattered and smeared up and down the beach.
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| Messy, messy! |
Yet it was a surprisingly light day for debris. The lightest so far this year. The energy that brought new wrack onto the beach also spent much time dragging that wrack (and its plastics) back down the foreshore.
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| Outflow |
The high tides weren't high enough to dump any debris on the flat backshore. Instead, it came to rest on the sloping foreshore, where most was pulled out to sea again by the offshore winds and receding tide.
The finds:
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| 13 pcs of rope, about 15 ft total |
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| 37 pcs of non-rope debris |
50 finds:
- Bldg material/furniture: 0
- Foam/styrofoam: 0
- Fishing rope/net: 13
- Fishing misc.: 14 (bait bag, fishing line, trap tag, 8 vinyl trap coating scraps, 2 trap parts, claw band)
- Food-related plastics: 12 (8 cup/top scraps, bottlecap o-ring, cutlery handle, 2 straw scraps)
- Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can base, sea glass)
- Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (baggie, strapping, tape)
- Scrap plastics: 3 ( all < 1" )
- Paper/wood: 0
- Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (2 scraps, cord)
All the usual culprits. Just less of them this week. Which left me more time to look at the beautiful.
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| Sandpiper tracks |
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| Shaggy beach cobbles |
What's more beautiful than life? Tenacious, wonderful life.
Running YTD counts:
- Total pcs of litter -- 9278
- Pcs fishing rope -- 1889
- Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4348
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