Collection Report - September 15, 2013

Saturday September 15. 1:15PM, near low tide. Mid-60s, nice seabreeze. Mostly sunny. Fall-like crisp air.

Beach looking still a lot like September 7. If maybe a bit more "unkempt." The live algae down low on the foreshore was still there -- though getting more muddled & ripped up. The low foreshore a jumble of cobbles & pebbles & boulders.

Higher against back of foreshore August's clusters & clumps of pebble-sized rocks were still there. But matted down. "Aging." Smushing themselves back down, unrestored by the late summer's weak waves.

Sadly those weak waves brought their payload of vinyl lobster trap bits again.

This time instead of up against the back of the foreshore, the bulk was strewn amid the standing water and boulders of the live-algae zone. A one-day slightly higher tide seems to have had enough energy to first spill over the foreshore berm, and then partially drag some of the vinyl load back down.

But again, there was no energy for bringing in large & heavy things like rope. It was another zero-rope day. And another sobering day.

1151 pcs of nonrope debris

1151 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 0
• Fishing misc.: 1043 (979 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 5 bumpers, 5 trap parts, 54 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 30 (bottlecap, 3 bottlecap o-rings, 24 cup scraps, cutlery scrap, straw scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (balloon, PhoneMate clip, Nifty Magnetic SpaceSaver Binder scrap, cord, cable tie, 2 plant stakes, anchor, 3 ring seals)
• Scrap plastics: 64 ( 16 > 1" , 48 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 1 (tile scrap)

A couple of the wash-ins were kind of cool. An ancient phone clip from an old PhoneMate answering machine system:

And a very worn & aged scrap from a "Nifty Magnetic SpaceSaver Binder":

Neither of these makes sense as ocean debris. Yet both were in the ocean. Probably from either an accidental trash-bag rip near a gutter, or debris from a violent coastal storm years ago.

But of course, the story this week, as many weeks running, is the lobster trap debris:

979 pieces of vinyl. A record.

That's barely enough to recreate one lost lobster trap. In the hour & a half that I was picking these pieces up at least 6 more lobster traps were lost in the waters of the Gulf of Maine.

That's not sustainable.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 8991
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1812
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5424