Collection Report - February 4, 2014

I stopped by on January 28. But the sea was bone-frozen, a giant ice block, but a beautiful day. So I came back a week later. Tuesday, February 4, 2014. 10:15AM. 2 hrs after a very low low tide.

Weather still a struggle this winter. Cold and messy. This day the temp was only in the upper 20s and still very icy. But there had been good melting from the weekend, so at least I had a chance to get at something.

From what I could see of the beach, it was just old wrack there, nothing new had washed in. Lots of pebbles & cobbles were exposed down low. Good banding of wave lines and wrack, and decent sorting. And a beautiful rippling of wave lines as last high-tide went out.

Weekend's rainspots meet morning's tide line

There were chunks of wrack sticking out of the sand all along the backshore, meaning a lot of fine sand had come in and buried what was there. It had been a beach-building couple of weeks, rather than winter's usual beach-eroding.

There was also a ridiculous amount of rusted metal bits of lobster traps, never seen that much on the beach at once! Heavy, bulky chunks just all over the shore.

What kind of a day was it?

45 pcs of rope, about 40 ft total

111 pcs of nonrope debris

156 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 45
• Fishing misc.: 86 (16 vinyl trap coatings, 62 trap parts!, 3 bumpers, 4 bait bags, clawband)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (4 cup scraps, wrapper scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 6 (2 new locally dropped cans, 1 small can scrap, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (cable tie)
• Scrap plastics: 11 ( 9 > 1" , 2 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 2 (glove, fabric scrap)

62 rusted chunks of lobster trap washed up! Never happened before. A very weird week for that.

I wish I had been able to unlock the ice at the backshore to fully clear the beach, but for the weather I had, I'm pleased with what I was able to pull off & show.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 11646
• Total from fishing -- 10136 (87.0%)
• Pcs fishing rope -- 2059
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 7174