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 - Jan 11, 2013

Friday January 11, 12:55 PM, ~2 hrs before low tide. Gray and windy. Two weeks since last visit; lots of the same plus a little change. The wrack from Dec. 24 was still there, now smeared up and down the backshore. No new goop in the mix. It seems the past two weeks had been relatively low energy, just a reshuffling of the deck.

With the old seaweed spread about, more of its plastic load lay now on the surface. And it was fearsome. There are at least 9 pieces of plastics in this square foot:

And of course, the ubiquitous balloons.

Launched from miles -- or hundreds of miles -- away, to end up here.

It was a depressing week for plastic garbage. But I did see something kind of fun:

This is a slipper shell (a kind of snall) upside-down attached to a small stone. A seagull was lifting and dropping this stone over & over, trying to shatter the shell against the cobbles of the low foreshore. Except, this week there were no cobbles on the foreshore! December's storm reshaped the beach, burying the low ground under soft, fine sand. The gull, clearly used to a rocky shoreface, was doing what he always did in order to break open a shell. And he was clearly confused why it wasn't working!

Ecology in action.

I'll be interested to see how long it is before the sand washes back away and the shore is "healed" to its more usual form. In the meantime, this was a busy week of collection, especially for rope.

232 pcs of rope, about 550 ft total

203 pcs of nonrope debris

435 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 232 (~550 ft)
• Fishing misc.: 90 (49 vinyls, 6 bumpers, 4 trap tags, 14 bait bags, 4 trap mesh, 2 parts, 2 vents, 7 clawbands, shotgun shell, buoy handle)
• Food-related plastics: 32 (3 bottles, 3 bottlecap rings, 9 cup scraps, 10 tops/scraps, salad dressing packet, 6 straws)
• Food-related glass/metal: 4 (4 can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 42 (13 bags/scraps, 2 mylar balloons, latex balloon, balloon string, golfball, 10 cords/cable ties, big wingnut, 5 upholstery scraps, 4 pcs tape, crate seal, pen cap, Victorinox knife handle, tubing)
• Scrap plastics: 27 ( 10 > 1" , 17 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 8 (5 fabric pieces, 3 gloves)

Just a mess. No other word for it. So much that could be discussed, but I'll point out just one bit. All of this food-related debris originated somewhere else:

Whether a fishing boat, pleasure boat, beach up the road, seaside in Nova Scotia, or city drain in Portland. All from somewhere else, and most of its spent a long time in the ocean. Note the marine-life bite/poke marks on things like this remnant of red Solo cup:

Or this blue cheese salad dressing packet:

When your life is packaged in plastic, it never really goes away.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 12271
• Pcs fishing rope -- 3313
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4742

A Sea of Possibilities

As some of you may know, I've just become the newest writer for the Portland Press Herald online!

My column, "Undercurrents," runs in the Press Herald's Environment-Outdoors blog section. It's very exciting to be part of the team. It'll be nice both for me to reach a new audience, and hopefully to be able to bring some Flotsam Diaries fans to have a closer look at Maine's issues & stories -- and its impressive writers.

For me, it's also exciting -- and poignant -- to know that the sea will always provide plenty of grist for the Undercurrents mill. Here's just a bit of what washed into quiet, deserted, "protected" Curtis Cove, Biddeford, Maine on December 24:

Hope to see you at Undercurrents, and hope to continue seeing you here as well!

Flotsam by Another Name

In this case, "sewage."

We don't often think much about where our waste goes. It's an inescapable part of life. And really, it's always just gone "away," right? But really, there is no "away." Sewage goes into our waterways, and greater populations mean far more of the stuff to deal with. Poor stewardship in one place can cause harm far downstream.

We're starting to learn this. Most people now get that the Ganges provides dangerously polluted drinking water to millions, or that farm/field waste pouring into major rivers worsens oceanic dead zones. But stewardship isn't just the purview of cities & nations & factory farms. How individuals and local businesses handle their waste can impact the environment as well. Which is why the Twice Brewed Inn in rural Northumberland, UK is a nice ray of light.

Downtown Twice Brewed, Tynedale, Northumberland, UK

The "Twicey" sits in the majestic central region of Hadrian's Wall -- the ancient Roman border wall built at the far northwest of the empire 1900 years ago. Hikers, wall-walkers, tourists, and archaeology volunteers from nearby Vindolanda call on the Twice Brewed for a clean bed, a hearty breakfast/dinner, good ale, and a lot of laughter. It's by far the busiest place in central Wall Country.

It also generates the most sewage in the area. For decades that sewage was treated by an aging, underpowered septic system out back. A tank collected solid waste, the liquid flowing into a stony "leach field" underground, where it percolated through the soil. Polluted leachate seeped into a small stream nearby, flowing from there into Brackies Burn, then Chinely Burn, and finally the river South Tyne, eventually emptying into the North Sea 40 miles away.

When it finally came time to redo the system, pub owner Brian Keen wanted to do things better. So instead of another tank and leach field, he installed a revolutionary new system. And by "revolutionary new" I mean "millennia old." The system still starts with a tank for solid waste. But then, the liquid is run through several steps to super-clean it before it re-enters the stream:

Aerator with rocks for sifting liquid to...

Two wetland pools (each the size of a shipping
container) stocked with local marsh grass to...

Piping down to streambed in valley

The aerator separates out the last of the solids and gets oxygen into the liquid. It's then piped by gravity to the two consecutive wetland pools. The pools act like a sponge and slow down the water flow along its course. The marsh grasses pull out a small percent of waste, and natural bacterial action takes care of the rest. By the end, what flows out of the last piping into the stream is clean, drinkable water! Instead of waste left to percolate & die deep underground over months or years, oxygen & bacteria attack it right away. Nature's recycling.

The only scent comes from the aerator. (It's not vile, and rarely reaches beyond the immediate vicinity.) The system has one moving part -- the aerator has a catch basin that tips out the liquid evenly among the aerator rocks when it gets filled. The two wetland pools can have their water level raised or lowered if needed -- though they self-regulate amazingly well. It's all so simple. And the cost was half a traditional setup.

So now, a pub/inn that can sleep dozens of people each night and serve over a hundred with drinks & dinner is also among the cleanest, best stewards of the area's waterways. (It's also a proud member of Britain's Green Tourism board, and uses a lot of innovation to conserve without sacrificing convenience.)

Generally the Flotsam Diaries is about... well... non-organic waste & pollution. But it's all part of the same story. And it's great to see folks doing their part to make the world a bit cleaner for all of us.

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Note: Neither I nor the Flotsam Diaries received any promotional consideration for the above. It just seemed like a good idea. Brian & Pauline have been very kind to this traveler for many years now, and I'm thrilled to get a chance to repay the favor in a small way.