Collection Report May 30, 2012

Down to wire for Year 2 at Bay View. This installment: Wednesday, May 30. Noon. 60 degrees. Foggy, overcast skies.

I missed the previous week due to rain, rain... And in the interim, Memorial Day weekend had come and gone! Still, the beach didn't look that different. There was the same old wrack line of dried-out organics. Same steep shoreface. Dunegrass encroaching & spreading as it has all year. Sand cusps from the beached sandbar high & pronounced. Basically, all just as it had been all spring.


With a few exceptions -- signs that Memorial Day had in fact come and gone. Such as (1) The return of the Bait Tank cigarette butt bin:

(2) Buried beer bottle bingo:

(3) Flotsam forts:

(4) Thoughtless chain-smokers at the "thinking log":

(5) And a new found toy for the collection:

All proof that the lazy days of winter and spring were past, and unofficial summer had begun. Despite the cold & damp of the day. So what was left behind in the sands? Zone N:

116 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 59
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 15 (bottle, 4 bottlecaps, bottlecap o-ring, 4 food wrappers, 3 straw wrappers, 2 candy wrappers)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (bottle, foil wine bottle top)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 61 (3 packaging scraps, tape, string/cord, 2 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 24 (23 cigs, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 8 (paper scraps)
• Misc./unique: 1 (swiffer cloth)

A local, summer signature. Except... so much foam. No idea where it all came from. Because looking at it, it's a little bit of everything! Insulation, coffee cups, coolers, squishy foam toys, clamshell packs... Just, everything. Some certainly washed/blown in. Portland, Maine is now considering banning styrofoam in the city. From my experience the past couple of years, I think it's high time.

On to Zone S:

66 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 53
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 1 (candy wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 3 (glass jar, jar lid, foil)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (watergun plug, 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 5
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

The glass jar was a half-full jar of pasta sauce. Random! And then there's all the foam & styrofoam here too. Tons of it. Including many of the same-looking bits as Zone N, and bits that had clearly been nipped & pecked by wildlife (fish? crabs? seagulls?):

Not just ugly. Far worse than just being ugly.

So there we have it. May 30. Winter is over. Tourists are back, at least a little. Time circles back around. And the beach tells the tale.

Collection Report Nov 28, 2011

Monday, November 28. 10:00AM. Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. Temp in the 50s. Overcast with occasional sun. Like, well, this:

A weird day. The kind of day where the sea has left behind rock gardens:

The purses of mermaids:

The homes of tubeworms:

As well as two horses and a rider with a fuzzy hat??

Then, of course, the usual:

So, what came out of the sand, all told? Zone N:

134 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 62 (!!)
• Fishing misc.: 5 (2 shotgun shells, claw band, 2 bits of fishing line)
• Food-related plastics: 8 (3 bottle-cap o-rings, 3 food wrappers/scraps, 2 gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 5 (bottle cap, 2 foil wrappers, 2 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 17 (o-ring, plastic hairband, plastic glove, bandaid, 2 wall anchors, kids shirt tag, rubberband, 2 scraps >1", 7 scraps < 1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 32
• Paper/wood: 1 (wood firecracker stick)
• Misc./unique: 0

This was the week for foam! See the riot of deadly color:

What I discovered this week is that the little protected corner near the access point is a real collection spot. There's an old log there, and the windward side amasses all kinds of seaweed, reeds, leaves, and plastic -- mostly light stuff like cigarette butts &, well, styrofoam. And now on to Zone S:

22 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3
• Fishing misc.: 3 (1 rope scrap - natural fiber, 2 vinyl coating)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle, pepper packet)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 9 (baggie, strapping, folding step!, 6 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

This, obviously, is the most interesting find:

Not least because I had no idea what it was, until a quick FaceBook "crowdsourcing." Flotsam Diaries fan Irene Parsons knew right away: the top of a folding step-stool! How it got to Bay View, with oceanic algae attached, I'll never really know.

My big takeaway for the week: If you don't know, ask. There's probably someone who does!

Collection Report March 23, 2011

March 23, Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. Another beautiful sunny morning.

9:45AM, 32 degrees F, an hr past a very low tide

The sea was remarkably low. As on the previous week, live sand-dollars poked out of the terrace by the hundreds. And it was a thrill leaving footsteps on a strip of low sand I'd never even seen before.

Higher up, one of the high tides in the past week had lapped at the edge of the dunes, pushing the cat-tails of March 9 up with them.

High and dry

It takes power to send waves that far up the beach. But again, where's the fresh seaweed & other floating debris? Records show at least a couple days of winds blowing from the east. (That is, off the ocean toward shore.) Yet, as so often this winter, almost nothing floated into Saco Bay, or beached itself at Bay View.

Here's Zone N (the northern of the two zones I visit each week):

32 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (asphalt chunk, 4 fence slats)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 9 (8 scraps, sponge)
• Fishing misc.: 2 (lobster claw band, partial lobster trap tag "CANADA LOB")
• Food-related plastics: 3 (#6 plastic cup scrap, popsicle wrapper, clingwrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 7 (tampon applicator, bottled water lid seal, 5 scraps)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

A tampon applicator three weeks in a row. That's just not nice. Otherwise, the most interesting piece was this trap tag fragment:

A journey of 150+ miles. But how
many months or years?

One thing that raised my eyebrow was the styrofoam. This was the first time in weeks that any significant batch of foam showed up.

A bit of everything

On to Zone S (the southern of the two zones I visit, separated from Zone N by about 100 feet):

13 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt chunks)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4 (coffee-cup base, 3 pieces styrofoam)
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rail from lobster trap tag)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (Poland Spring water bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 1 (scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (ladies right size 4 "Liberty Brand" rubber shoe)

The bottle is grimy, but doesn't show sealife attached to it. The shoe is rotted and ruined, but can't tell whether it came from the sea or was buried in the sand for months/years. But look, more foam.

The orange chunks match the chunk
found in Zone N

Out of 45 pieces of litter, 13 were foam. Blowing the lid off that curve. So is that just a blip? Or does it mean something? I wish I knew.

Anyway, this week was a tiny haul. In two weeks at the end of December/beginning of January, I pulled up nearly 1,000 pieces of garbage, strewn among hundreds of blobs of seaweed. All of it, wreckage dragged into Saco Bay and heaved onto the sand by the Christmas storm. Since then, we've had nor'easters, we've had gales, storms, high seas, big weather. But there hasn't been another beaching -- of seaweed or plastic or both -- on anything like that scale since.

Wouldn't it be nice to believe that one big storm could rid a gulf of its man-made burden? I wish I believed that.

Collection Report Oct 7, 2010

As promised, the collection report from October 7. From my first steps on the beach, I knew the majority of my finds were going to be fence slats. I just didn't know how many:

Zone N

Zone S

But even with roaring waves & brutal winds, there were plenty of other goodies as well. Here's Zone N:

252 finds:

• Building material: 104 (fence slats)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 50 (!!)
• Fishing misc.: 9 (6 bits of rope, two trap tags, 1 lobster trap, heavily bashed)
• Food-related plastics: 6
• Food-related metal/glass: 5
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 28 (inc. balloon, piece of another balloon, "Tattoo" tag, white bow, happy face, umbrella base, and a bandaid)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 41 (25 local & 16 floaters)
• Paper/wood: 4
• Misc./unique: 5 (quarter -- who says this doesn't pay??, firework bit, 2 blobs of candle wax, half of plastic recycling tub washed in from New Brunswick, Canada)

Couldn't quite believe how many scraps of styrofoam I kept finding. Everywhere I looked, more little balls of polystyrene hiding amid the kelp, or down in some tiny hollow where the wind couldn't reach them.

Foam mix-and-match

Plus, of course, all the usual suspects...

Banner day for misc. plastics

On to Zone S:

186 finds:

• Building material: 133
• Foam/Styrofoam: 25
• Fishing misc.: 5 (3 buoys/buoy scraps, 2 bits of rope)
• Food-related plastics: 3
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (rotted scrap of aluminum can)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 10 (inc. two toggles, balloon scrap, magazine packaging?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 8 (2 local + 3 "floaters" + 3 cigar ends)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (half of a Zodiac XDC deepwater inflatable boat -- not brought home!)

The foam frenzy of Zone N carried (unshockingly given the wind) through Zone S. It brought polystyrene bits both small, and not so small.

More foam fiesta -- trending blue in Zone S

Some storm ripped rope straight thru yellow buoy

All told, on October 7 I collected 438 pieces of debris. Even taking out the 237 bits of fencing, the rest of the numbers are still topsy-turvy from the height of summer: almost no food plastics, compared to 75 bits of foam & styrofoam. On the other hand, there were constants too: the ever-present cigarette, the colorful scraps of plastic that were all once intended to make life a little brighter, easier, more interesting.

When I started this so many months ago, I never really expected to find half a boat. But I find that little surprises me anymore. If man has made it, a specimen of it is probably in the sea, right now. Just waiting to surface again when the time is right.

All more proof that a beach without sunbathers is still daily visited by the waste of the modern world.

Collection Report July 20, 2010

Yet another stretch of sweltering heat and sunny days. On Monday night, 7/19, a doozy of a storm came through, but it unleashed far more lightning & rain than wind. Would it leave its mark on the finds at Bay View this week?

Well, this week it was a little bit of everything. Finds ranged from the sweet...

(Hoping in vain the owner would return)

...to the wacky...

(Reward for discovering what this is)

...to the poignant...

(No caption needed)

...to "how did you forget this when packing up?":

On to the specifics. Zone N, easily the most colorful and diverse haul since I started:

196 finds:

• Building materials: 3
• Foam/Styrofoam: 10 (inc. weird yellow felty foamy scrap)
• Fishing misc.: 2 (commercial rope, first bit washed in for a few weeks)
• Food-related plastics: 33 (inc. nectarine label, banana label (see pic above!), "Produce from Mexico" band, 4 ketchup packs [two unopened], 2 spoons, Welch's Fruit Snacks, Quaker Chewy Granola Bar, Yogos Crashers, Capri Sun, various wrappers)
• Food-related metal/glass: 8 (3 beer bottle caps, one pulltab, 2 gum wrappers, one half-used soggy roll of mints, one applesauce lid)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 31 (inc. small bucket, half-burned BIC lighter, bizarre plastic thingy (pic below), Lego piece - more on this, 2 bandaids, pen cap, bright orange syringe cap?)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 87 (78 local, 9 maybe washed in)
• Paper/wood: 15
• Misc./unique: 6 (full Circle K coffee cup, 2 flipflops - one broken, 2 paddle pieces, 1 weird rubbery "fish tail" or something?)

Actually a lot of bizarre finds. The rubbery, wiggly fishtail thingy has really taken a beating. Maybe a fishing lure at one point? Seriously no clue. It's on the right in this picture:

Here's another weird one. Solid circular base. Then perforated side, and then 4 "arms" sticking out of it. Doesn't look like a toy, and doesn't look like it was just lost at the beach yesterday either:

But here's the one I really want you to see:

"Dude, it's a Lego." Yes, yes it is. But, seriously, who brings Legos to the beach? They're tiny, they get lost, they don't work when they get sand in them. Maybe this wasn't a beachgoer's Lego? It turns out, there's an excellent story, involving .... well, I'll write a separate post about that. Soon. It's a good one. Stay tuned!

Anyway, quick recap of Zone S:

28 finds:
bottlecap, 4 plastic scraps, 2 pieces of foam, 4 pieces of food plastics (possibly all from the same meal - sandwich wrappers, oil packet, fork), 14 cigarettes (10 local, 4 maybe washed in), paper UPC tag, popsicle stick, and...

...my new mascot! I found him right at high-tide line. It's hard to picture anybody dropping & losing something so bright & shiny. But he's also very clean & fresh, and it's hard to picture that he's from the ocean. Still, in my mind, he's traveled a very, very long way, and has quite a story in him. And again, if anyone knows who or what this thing is, please tell me!

A light week (by recent standards), but an intriguing one. Don't know if the big storm blew debris into the ocean, or punched it deep into the sand, or if there was just less trash. At any rate, it was a nice change.