Thursday June 27, 9AM. Low-tide 2 weeks since last visit. Stormy day the day or two before. Overcast & wet skies.
Green algae healthy on the low foreshore shows that the recent storms didn't have a lot of ripping/tugging energy. Life quickly growing back into the pulverized backshore:
A day of contrasts. The tide pools high up, away from the rotting wrack, were crystal clear, beautiful, and full of life:
The tide pools caught in the line of runoff were miasmas, dead.
There's such a thing as too much nutrients -- too much of a good thing! As well as, of course, way too much of a bad thing:
The smear of tiny plastics spread throughout the fine pulverized wrack on the foreshore told me this would be a busy day. All told, here's what I collected:
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| 67 pcs of rope, about 80 ft total |
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| 252 pcs of nonrope debris |
300 finds:
- Bldg material/furniture: 0
- Foam/styrofoam: 1
- Fishing rope/net: 67 (80 ft)
- Fishing misc.: 158 (127 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 15 trap parts, 2 bumpers/cleats, 13 clawbands, buoy-stick scrap)
- Food-related plastics: 21 (19 cup scraps, 2 food wrappers)
- Food-related glass/metal: 3 (can scraps)
- Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (3 straps, vinyl stitching, old flanged tube, cable tie, 5 cords)
- Scrap plastics: 36 ( 20 >1" , 16 < 1" )
- Paper/wood: 0
- Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (fabric scrap, 2 sea glass)
All of the above that I found is new -- it's not the remnants of winter storms filtering back into the sea. This is just new stuff that the sea is continually dumping on the shores of Curtis Cove. A couple of the more curious items:
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| -Ancient- plastic chair/table foot |
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| Badly fish-eaten lobster claw bands |
We keep giving it to the ocean. The ocean keeps giving it to us.
Running YTD counts:
- Total pcs of litter -- 4611
- Pcs fishing rope -- 1722
- Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 1880
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