Collection Report Feb 6-7, 2012

Monday, Feb. 6, 3:30PM. Low-tide. Brilliant late sun with its long shadows:

A whole lot of bright blue sky, and a whole lot of nothing else. The only thing to see was a dry "wrack" line of landborne reeds. The final gasp of the large sand-dump from two weeks before lay as a very faint sandbar just seaward from the foreshore. Otherwise, the beach was back to normal. No rocky strewn-field, no starfish, no tube-worm casings by the thousands. Just soft sand spread along from dune to terrace.

A lovely day for a walk, but dismal for collecting flotsam.

On a hunch, I stopped by again Tuesday. The difference a day makes. Noon, an hour past high-tide. Mostly cloudy, 40s again, slight onshore breeze, and another weak, low high-tide line. But... fresh seaborne wrack!

Overnight the Bay dumped a batch of fresh, seafloor "sea colander."

See? It sinks

All winter long there has been nothing floating into Bay View. Everything that gets kicked up is from different parts of the seafloor. In that regard, this week was the same as the past two months. But at least this week some combination of magic churned up the seabed and dragged in a few things of interest from the watery grave. First, Zone N:

78 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (7 brick, 2 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 25
• Fishing misc.: 9 (5 rope scraps, 2 clawbands, lure bag scrap, shotgun shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 6 (2 bottlecap o-rings, 2 Solo cup scraps, food wrapper, fork)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 17 (plastic glove, swiffer scrap, 2 toy scraps, battery/cartridge cover, silk flower, toggle weight ?, 5 scraps >1", 5 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 10 (9 cigarettes, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (fabric swatch)

A lot of foam, but none of it showed signs of sea voyage. Probably bits and pieces blown in from up and down the shore, out of garbage cans or freed from dunes. The other, non-foam plastics showed signs of being ocean-borne. And like I said, they were all dense, sunken plastics tossed up from the seabottom.

Zone S:

30 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (6 asphalt, wood offcut, tile, concrete)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, bait bag)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (bottlecap o-ring, 3 food wrapper scraps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (balloon w/ string, 2 large vinyl upholstery scraps, 2 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 2 (cloth strip, leather offcut)

Those upholstery scraps were some of the most brutalized, tortured pieces of vinyl I've ever seen. Whatever their story, I'm sure it's a doozy.

Still, flotsam-wise there really is no comparison between Winter '11 and Winter '12. The same can be said weather-wise. Are the two related? Does warmer air shut down the systems that normally drag thousands of bits of plastic into the bay? Does less snow/rain = less river runoff = changed circulation patterns? I don't know. But it's worth looking into.

Collection Report Sep 13, 2011

Tuesday, September 13, 7:52 AM. Already a bright, muggy day.

Feeling the glow

Labor Day was well and truly past. The benches, trash cans, lifeguard tower -- stowed away for the year. The sun & sky may not have gotten the message. But the earth had.

Welcome back, mysterious
crawlers of the low-tide line

Autumn's sand trails were back. Sandpipers too, scurrying along the edge of each wave. Along the roads, the leaves of young -- or weak-willed -- maples were already kissed with a hint of red and orange. The earth knows.

Which is why the hot sun and Labor Day remnants strewn across the sand came as a shock. (It was a busy collection, as you'll see.) This twilight time, mid-September, straddles two very different Maines.

Curiously, there was still no wrack-line of Irene debris. The early August wash-in along with Irene's offshore winds really did scour Saco Bay clean. Even so, the ocean still left a couple calling cards:

The NH sewage treatment plant disc
saga continues, and will for years

And another applicator. Sigh.

It's all still out there. It'll make its next appearance when it feels like it. (See Delaware, where heaps of plastic garbage floating in just a week after the big Intl Coastal Cleanup.)

So on to the finds. Zone N first, as always:

177 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (1 chunk asphalt, 2 wooden blocks)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 28
• Fishing misc.: 16 (4 bits rope, 4 claw bands, 6 bits of rope twine, 2 buoy scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 6 (bottle, bottlecap, food wrapper, 2 utensils, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (3 cans/scraps, 1 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 26 (7 bags/scraps, 3 bandaids, 3 toys (tank tread, "hamburger," squishy foot), theme park wristband, 2 bottlecaps, plastic strapping, chair/umbrella plug, expand-foam tube, 1 scrap >1", 6 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 82 (81 filters, 1 wood filter tip)
• Paper/wood: 11 (10 paper scraps, 1 wooden stick)
• Misc./unique: 1 (fabric scrap)

A little bit of everything, including the partially burned leftovers of at least one massive bonfire (some in this closeup).

Set it, and forget it. BTW, Ruby has a set of plastic food including the same hamburger. Might clean this one up and add it to her collection. Supersize Me.

As always, Zone S had less to offer.

32 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 5
• Fishing misc.: 3 (2 rope scraps, buoy scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (bottle, bottlecap, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (seaglass, gum wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (2 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, cord, tennis ball, Hooksett disc, tampon applicator, 2 scraps >1", 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 6 (5 filters, 1 rolling paper)
• Paper/wood: 2 (paper scrap, wood clothespin)
• Misc./unique: 0

Oddly, the most interesting find of the week came from here:

"Game ends 12/31/10"

Old, scuffed, battered... But no signs of sealife on it. So... what's the story? Someone's favorite water bottle, reused for months and then lost? A dog toy? Or ocean-borne? I'd love to know.

Collection Report Oct 28, 2010

Wow. I'm getting behind here. Not cool. Quick catchup from a bright and unseasonably warm October 28.

My kind of busy

The high-tide line was not hard to spot. A fairly lazy high tide following a cold but mostly forgettable week. (Though a good shower the day before had churned things up nicely.)

Tell-tale kelp line

My stroll this day brought some things small:

Easy to spot when your eye is in

Some things not so small:

Huggies or Pampers? I didn't look that closely

Some things that look like other things:

Bag scrap masquerades as withered seagrass

Some head-scratchers:

Cap to a diner table syrup bottle? Really?

And some things that magically washed up as I ambled along the shoreline on the way back to my car:

Leather shoe sole, tossing in the surf

All told, an interesting haul. Here's Zone N:

54 finds:

• Building material: 3 (1 slat, 2 chunks of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12
• Fishing misc.: 4 (lobster trap bumper, rope, shotgun shell wadding, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (including label from a lemon)
• Food-related metal/glass: 6
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 12 (inc. grocery store bag, bag scrap, toy beach rake/fork, 2 bits of netting, diaper)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 8 (1 local, 6 floaters, 1 plastic cigar end)
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 3 (woven plastic sack, packaging from a present, lonely heart note)

This collection included one of the more poignant bits I've found - a note written to "Dear Universe," from a lonely heart looking for Mr. Right. When I found it, it was melting away from the rain. I saved it and brought it back home, which felt right at the time. Now I'm not so sure. Was that note an intrusion on the beach? Or was my taking it home an intrusion on somebody's heartfelt wish? All I know is, I hope her dream comes true.

An annoying find was the label from a lemon.

*Paramount Citrus, CA Lemon, USA 4958

Plastic. How can it be that now even every piece of fresh fruit at the supermarket is graced with it? Enough already? Then again, it has been a neat mystery for the past couple weeks -- who brought a lemon to the beach in 40-degree late October, and why?

Moving on to Zone S:

39 finds:

• Building material: 12 (5 fence slats, 1 thin post, 4 chunks of asphalt, 1 bit of brick, 1 bit burned painted wood)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 7 (inc. large chunk of buoy?)
• Fishing misc.: 4 (3 bits of rope, 1 bit of lobster trap coating)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 6 (inc. syrup bottle lid, caution tag)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 6 (2 local + 4 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 4 (leather shoe sole, 3 pcs blue fabric)

The foot traffic of summer is gone; Zone N's numbers have stabilized well below the 200+ bits it had been giving. And it's interesting to see how Zones N & S now start looking so alike. Not surprising. But nice to see a hypothesis blossom: Yes, beachgoers leave a fearsome amount of trash; but the debris that fouls the coasts of southern Maine has a thousand fathers.

The other big thing to note is the recent collapse of cigarette debris. Of course there are fewer people on the beach, thus fewer smokers. But the ones that wash in at high-tide line with their paper worn off -- they're way down too. Why? Only one way to find out. Keep counting, and turn the page...

After the Storm - Collection Report August 26, 2010

You might think, from the past several posts, that most of the "flotsam" arriving in Maine is just litterbugs at the beach. Week after week, same things -- food wrappers, broken toys, cigarette butts. Sad, maybe, but pretty predictable.

Then comes a morning like Thursday, August 26.

You see, for weeks -- months -- my part of the world coasted through one of the sunniest, warmest, most peaceful summers on record. We had an incredible run of beach weather, which came to an end on Wednesday, August 25. It rained all day, the winds whipped the trees, the heavy clouds dimmed the skies.

The storm system dumped several inches, and only finally moved out to sea after nightfall. When I arrived at Bay View beach at 7:30 Thursday morning, for once I wasn't looking at a vista shaped by beachgoers, but by the forces of nature.

What, doesn't look different? How about this angle:

This was going to be a busy morning. Because, as I've recorded in posts like this, and this, and this, thanks to modern life and modern products, the sea is no longer just home to marine life. It's home to the refuse of our life too.

On to the details of Zone N. And this one blew the usual curve to bits.

232 finds:

• Building material: 6 (including various waterlogged burned bits of unknown provenance)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 17 (inc. chunk of painted pot? and Sam's Club coffee mug scrap)
• Fishing misc.: 28 (21 rope bits, 5 claw bands, 2 bits of flare shell)
• Food-related plastics: 26 (inc. Swiss Chard twist-tie, Twix, Butterscotch, Coke bottle cap, Turkey Club Wrap wrapper, M&Ms, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, Slim Jim, and Quaker Caramel Nut granola bar)
• Food-related metal/glass: 3
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 65 (inc. ancient bit of duct tape with kelp growing through it, 20 shreds of brittle hard plastic bits, 4 balloon pieces, security bar from a book, plastic seal reading "Hygienic Protection" (eww), tire valvestem cap, plastic sleeve to deck chair or railing, 2 badly worn & abraded bandaids)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 65 (52 local, 13 likely floaters)
• Paper/wood: 15 (including Dunstan School Buffet brochure, Worcester Dunkin Donuts receipt dated 8/20 (which survived the storm intact), 2 bits of Clorox bleach label, tag from some kind of textile/pillow, London Underground ticket scrap dated June 16)
• Misc./unique: 7 (bungee cord scrap, little bouncy ball, dog's waterlogged tennis ball (probably washed in), firework bit, flipflop, 2 mismatched socks)

See what I mean? 28 pieces of fishing material, when usually it's 3 or 4; 65 bits of nonfood plastic -- mostly scraps and twisted, abraded bits, likely seaborne. And this all in a stretch of 270 feet. The coast of Maine runs 3500 miles.

Plus, I have no illusion that I got everything. I spent a full hour and a half in Zone N, kicking & picking through the kelp. I tried my best. But Wednesday's storm had tossed up over a foot of new sand, burying kelp and everything that rode in with it. Who knows how much is still there, or when it will come to light.

On to some of the standouts.

Maine's lifeblood has its downside

Out of one, many

As I hinted in this post, it's hard to know how far some of that commercial fishing gear traveled. But at least one piece of it took quite a journey:

Left - maybe local; Right - not local!

(And that's not the first "Wild Canada" lobster claw band to have made the 200+ mile swim from Nova Scotia's waters - scroll down in link for editorial.) But it's not just fishing gear that the waves brought in.

Event balloons from another day, another place

Duct tape w/ kelp running through it

Brittle, battered, old, and likely seaborne

Amongst the mess were a couple neat treats:

Who doesn't love a bright yellow starfish 

An Englishman in Saco?
(Probably -not- washed in!)

And lastly, how on earth did this survive the deluge?

Oh yeah, because it was coated in plastic

I decided to save Zone S for the next day, because it was already late in the morning. Sadly, when I returned on Friday, the scene in Zone S had changed:

Somebody had judiciously raked the entire length of the beach, leaving just about nothing to find, and making it rather pointless to try. I'll never be able to compare how much washed into Zone S, and I was really looking forward to the comparison. So I'll just have to wait for another storm.

Still, this was the wake-up day. Sure, litterbugs foul the beaches they wander. But the problem is so much larger than careless beachgoers. It has become a plastic world, nourished by a plastic ocean. And it just takes a bit of a storm to bring that point home.

Speaking of the storm: how bad was it? Well, the tide charts showed a 9-foot high tide. The high-tide mark on the beach Thursday morning was typical of an 11-foot high tide. The "squall of the summer" barely brought a two-foot surge. Countless plastic scraps were hurled up and down the shore by a pitiful rainshower that barely made news in Thursday's paper.

As I write this, Hurricane Earl is a Category 4 monster down near the Caribbean. It's expected to reach New England by the end of the week. You want to know what's in the ocean? We may all know soon.

Collection Report August 18, 2010

A bit late getting this one up. But at long last!

August 18 greeted me with a few breaking clouds & a coolish breeze, the first reminder that our summer is winding down.

It's that time of year where there's a tension in the air -- an expectation. More people are on the road, trying to squeeze out the last bit of vacation. Folks are getting to the beach earlier, lingering longer. Minds are focused on anything but the return to school, layers, jackets. Which might explain how someone could forget this:

Cushy chair, cold drink, tasty snacks... *POOF* Just walked away. Confession: I did not put this into my bag & record it.

Second confession. I also didn't count everything I did pick up. I took a moment from bagging to dump several dozen jagged remnants of a Bacchanal into the metal trash bin on-site:

Always comforting what people will leave in the sand.

On to the finds. Zone N (which I really thought was going to be small):

It wasn't small. 266 finds:

• Building material: 3 (sawn blocks & part of a plank/clapboard)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 9 (inc. another part of the airplane that I started finding back on July 27)
• Fishing misc.: 2 (claw bands, one fresh & one a bit jagged)
• Food-related plastics: 37 (inc. 5 water/soda bottles plus 3 burned bits of bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 13 (inc. a piece of what was just starting to turn into worn-down seaglass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 32 (inc. 5 bandaids, balloon, shovel handle, action figure arm, packaging reading "Toys $2.99", orange plastic nozzle)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 112 (101 fresh, 6 floaters, 5 packaging - including cigar pack with 7 wrapped cigars still inside)
• Paper/wood: 44 (inc. piece from Spanish-language magazine, fireworks packaging (still from July 4th??), business card, pail & shovel label, umbrella tag, bath towel tag)
• Misc./unique: 14 (inc. size XS ripped shorts, sock, 3 wads of gum, several tattered string/rope scraps)

Another colorful, if mostly predictable, collection. A few standouts:

Somebody's ultra-army is a tad sadder now

Four "Huh?"s

Foam from same original objects every week

Moving on to Zone S, which, as usual, was rather subdued:

54 finds:

• Building material: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 10
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 3 (inc. two burned things)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 5 (inc. very aged/brittle little capsule holder?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 31 (27 fresh + 4 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 2
• Misc./unique: 1 (sea glass)

It's funny, sea glass always seems to be a Zone S thing. And as an example of what happens when plastic sits out too long:

Photodegradation, in all its glory!

Big takeaway from this week: People at the beach just can't seem to help burning stuff. And a second takeaway: You can toss that plastic bottle or wrapper into a roaring fire pit, but when the party's over and the embers die, it hasn't gone away.

I'll end this week with a teaser. If you're getting tired of the same old beach trash week to week, you're not alone. (People go to beach and litter, dog bites man.) But I was back there this morning. Yesterday (August 25) it rained all day, with some pretty serious winds too. Here's what I saw at 8:00AM:

A hint: It wasn't just kelp that washed up

Collection Report August 4, 2010

Wednesday, August 4, 7:30AM. Seems the gulls had a late-night party of their own. (Being scavenged, I didn't record these, just put them back in the bin.)

Oh, if anyone wonders why someone can get jazzed about picking up garbage week after week, three words:

Location, Location, Location

Anyway, on to business. Most recent high-tide: 6:04AM, 7.6 feet (the gentlest of all August, say the tide charts). This week's haul was a pretty typical lot, back to big numbers after a quiet couple of weeks. Here's Zone N:

246 finds:

• Building materials: 6 (inc. section of aluminum framing, reminding me of my languishing soda can experiment)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 15 (inc. 10 disintegrating pieces from same cup/plate)
• Fishing misc.: 1 (claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 37 (inc. my first Lunchables tray find)
• Food-related metal/glass: 9
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 22 (inc. small blue peg, piece of rotting woven totebag, a label reading "pull straight")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 116 (107 local + 5 possible floaters + 4 wrapper scraps)
• Paper/wood: 33 (inc. 2 beach towel tags, seedless watermelon label, pepper packet, Funtown Splashtown waterpark receipt, burnt kindling, strip that reads "Fold and Tear Here"
• Misc./unique: 7 (4 bits of twine, firework piece, hairband, stretchy cord)

Only a couple things stuck out:

Frame's been in the elements a while

Out of one.... many

Zone S was equally pedestrian:

46 finds:

• Building materials: 1
• Foam/Styrofoam: 2
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 9
• Food-related metal/glass: 6
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (pirate "gold" coin, brittle bit of electrical tape, 2 beach chair feet, 3 bandaids, plastic hang tag)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 17 (12 local + 4 possible floaters + 1 wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 2 (firework parts)

OK, I like the little pirate coin. And the beer bottle -- so the owner downs the beer, conscientiously puts the cap back on... then leaves the whole thing behind?

And of course it's not always going to be "Whoa, look at that!" I know that's not the point. Still, I'm struggling to find a takeaway or gem this week. So, please feel free to insert an enlightened outro riiiiiiiight.... here.