Collection Report - September 23, 2013

Monday, September 23. 8:30AM. Right at low-tide. Bright sun. 55 degrees. Colors of the bushes along the backshore starting to change as fall begins to take hold. Still pink, purple, red, & white blooms on the beach roses.

This day I saw some erosion at back of foreshore. Heavier bits of seaweed had been tossed up & clumped there. And a small cliff had formed from waves pounding into back of foreshore and dragging back some of the softer sand.

The low-foreshore rocks had a pretty unsorted/jumbled look to them. August's cusps & mounds had been smeared and flattened out. There was lots of larger tossed-up wrack. And amidst that I found new pieces of rope, the first bits of newly washed-in rope that I'd seen in some months. That only seems to happen here when there's been true energy coming in. That same energy seems to have been what's scoured the sand back. Things changing as summer turns to autumn.

And as summer forage turned to autumn fruits, out have come the deer!

I tracked out four sets of deer prints on the beach! Pressed deeply & freshly into the soft sand at the backshore. Two large prints, two small prints. Sometime just overnight judging by how fresh the tracks were. I love this beach.

Someone else loves this beach. I found the carapace of a cooked lobster amid a rock ring. Looking at its shell, I see why it was cooked.

This lobster has the dreaded "shell disease" -- a parasite that damages lobster shells but leaves the meat untainted. It's still fit to eat, but nobody would want to buy a lobster that looked like that. The lobsterman who caught this possibly cooked it up for his family.

Shell disease decimated southern New England's lobster fishery starting in 1999. It's creeping northward. If it hits the Gulf of Maine with full force, the lobster industry is in real trouble.

Well, the higher energy this week would usually mean less debris left behind than in recent weeks. Did it?

50 pcs of rope, about 50 ft total

326 pcs of nonrope debris

376 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 50
• Fishing misc.: 253 (237 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 4 trap parts, bait bag, bumper, 10 clawbands)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (2 bottlecap seals, 18 cup scraps, 2 bread tags, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 14 (cigarette, bandaid, 6 cable ties, 2 cords, 4 anchors)
• Scrap plastics: 34 ( 11 > 1" , 23 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 0

Disturbingly, 243 pieces of lobster trap was indeed far less than what I'd been averaging for the previous month. 326 pieces of garbage coming off an untouristed beach. And that's a "good day."

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9320
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1862
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5667

Curtis Cove Report - Oct 19, 2012

This was originally going to be a report for Thursday, October 18. But my trip got cut short just as I was getting onto the beach. So I came back the next day. And what a difference a day can make!

Oct 18, 8:45AM - sand, cobbles, a little wrack

Oct 19, 8:45AM - mounds & bands of wrack!

There was no major weather system that moved through overnight Thursday. No massive winds. The tides were similar overnight as they had been Wednesday night. Yet this happened!

So, Friday, October 19th. 8:45AM. Thick clouds, large flocks of migratory birds going past. And a lot of seaweed. Sadly, where there's seaweed, there's plastic. Thursday's sunny skies, birdsong, and images of:

and:

became Friday's gloom:

The waves overnight Thursday night brought both a huge dump and big scour event. In addition to all the seaweed up high, much sand had been pulled back down low again. The 200-lb mass of knotted rope and trap bits that had been buried on the high foreshore all summer was peeking out again.

Kicking through the seaweed (and hundreds of sand fleas still clinging to their warmth) was depressing. You always hope that maybe things aren't really as bad in the oceans as you think. Then you realize that yes, yes they are. Here's what I found:

77 pcs of rope, about 75 ft total

248 pcs of nonrope debris

325 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 5 (plywood scrap, carpet swatch, 3 feet/bases)
• Foam/styrofoam: 1
• Fishing rope/net: 77
• Fishing misc.: 137 (12 claw bands, 112 vinyl trap scraps, trap tag, 2 bumpers, 3 trap parts, bait baggie, 4 bait bags, glove, fishing line)
• Food-related plastics: 32 (2 bottlecaps, 3 o-rings, fresh McCafe cup and lid, 21 cup scraps, 4 cutlery scraps)
• Food-related glass/metal: 6 (can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 25 (6 bag scraps, 1 mylar balloon, 3 industrial bottlecaps, cigarette, diaper, sewage disk, duct tape, 2 cable ties, lg heavy float (?) fragment, shirt tag, stick-on hook, cover/cap, cord, 4 heavy clear plastic scraps)
• Scrap plastics: 40 ( 19 > 1" , 21 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 2 (fabric scraps)

A little comparison. More than a year and a half ago now, in March 2011, Hooksett, New Hampshire's sewage treatment facility had a major accident. They flushed into the river 4 million "sewage disks" -- little plastic mesh disks meant to be suspended in the tanks and give bacteria extra habitat for growing and breaking down sewage. About 400,000 remain unaccounted for. They'll be washing up for decades. This one came into Curtis Cove on the 19th:

After all that time in the harsh sea, it looks as good as new. Unstained, flexible, perfect. So how long do you think it's taken for this bottlecap/twist-cap to look like this?

Plastic is forever. And while it's all out there in the ocean being forever, it's also getting poked, chewed, and consumed.

All due respect to NOAA, the problem isn't "marine debris." It's plastic pollution. And it will only keep getting worse as long as we keep dancing around it.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9948
• Pcs fishing rope -- 2054
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4554