Curtis Cove Report - Oct 26, 2012

It's hard now to remember a time before Superstorm Sandy. Yet I was at the cove on Friday, October 26, just a few days before she arrived. Here's what I found.

1:15PM. Low tide. Bright sun, no clouds. Nearly 60 degrees, slight breeze blowing off the shore. A good day to be here.

Winds and tides had finished pushing much of last week's wrack high onto the backshore. The rest of the foreshore had a nice smooth profile with fine sand and beautiful striations from the last outgoing tide. This was a mixed day. One of beautiful rusty rocks:

Barnacle-laden medicine bottles:

Ephemeral wave-drawn artistry in the sand:

Rich textures created by wood & worm:

And a first -- my first lobster trap tag from Massachusetts:

Coastal currents travel south in these parts. The only way for this Massachusetts tag to have made it so far north is if it first floated far out into the wider Gulf of Maine. There it would have gotten caught in one or more of the counterclockwise drifts or rotations. It may have circled over & over for months or years before finally being spat out on the northern side of its rotation. From there, it rode waves & tides in, finally coming to rest in Biddeford, Maine. Wondrous thing, the ocean.

Still, with so much wrack to go through up on the backshore, it was certainly not going to be a light day.

94 pcs of rope, about 200 ft total

62 pcs of nonrope debris

157 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 2 (carpet tile, grommet)
• Foam/styrofoam: 6
• Fishing rope/net: 94
• Fishing misc.: 22 (6 vinyl trap scraps, 2 trap tags, 3 bumpers, 4 bait bags, 3 trap parts, 2 clawbands, glove, shotgun shell)
• Food-related plastics: 8 (old scrap from 2-ltr bottle bottom, 2 bottlecap seals, 3 cup scraps, 2 wrappers)
• Food-related glass/metal: 1 (aluminum can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 15 (2 latex balloons, 4 balloon strings, 3 bag scraps, plasticized writing card, pen cap, Geobra/Playmobil toy person, cable tie, caution tape, packaging scrap)
• Scrap plastics: 6 (2 > 1" , 4 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (3 fabric pieces)

A big rope day. A surprising find of styrofoam -- something that almost never shows up here at the cove. A ribbon that didn't take its own advice:

CAUTION: I may blow away

A plasticized/waterproof card with cryptic note:

Glad it wasn't "4 8 15 16 23 42"

And Flotsam Diaries' new mascot:

Not quite Harry Potter

The higher energy in the waves this week seems to have kept most of the lobster trap vinyl scraps at bay, while scouring & reshaping the whole cove and leaving much else behind. The calm before storm... wasn't so calm.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 10105
• Pcs fishing rope -- 2148
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4560