Collection Report - Dec 8, 2013

Sunday December 8. 10:00AM An hour after low tide. 27-28 degrees. Overcast, thin clouds. Three weeks since my last visit. Dull, dull, dull weeks, except for one windstorm the previous week.

Seeing an even, gradual slope from the back of the backshore down, down, to the waterline. Fresh-ish wrack had come in during the ensuing weeks.

There was a huge mound of pebbles at back of foreshore -- almost a dune, most likely washed up by the windstorm.

Interestingly, there was still some seaweed tenaciously clinging to rocks and to life down on the low foreshore.

Another indicator of the dull & mild weather Maine had been getting to now. Snowstorms in DC, Missouri, freezes in deep South. But fragile life persisting on a Maine beach!

Curiously, there was still lobster trap vinyl washing in & staying, even with the previous week's storms.

These little flecks get sucked back out to sea very easily with any wave energy. Their presence is another indicator of calm weather.

On the other hand, heavier stuff did wash in as well. Lots of small chunks of lobster trap still with iron inside. And this 30-40-year-old aluminum can top:

So, waves strong enough to dislodge and dredge up an ancient piece of metal, but gentle enough to leave vinyl scraps behind. Strong enough to shape pebbles into dunes, but not strong enough to bring trap vents, bait bags, and other floatables over the rocks at the head of the cove.

An odd day.

14 pcs of rope, about 25 ft total

112 pcs of nonrope debris

126 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 1 (cup scrap, washed in)
• Fishing rope/net: 14 (25 ft)
• Fishing misc.: 90 (70 vinyl trap coating scraps, 12 metal trap parts, 7 claw bands, fishing line)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (cup scrap, intact but abraded knife, fork scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 5 (2 new local cans, 2 sea glass, old pulltab-era can top)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (cord, tape)
• Scrap plastics: 11 ( 6 > 1" , 5 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 0

A quiet day by recent standards. But an odd one. What all did I miss during the weeks I was kept away from the beach? Who knows...

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 11061
• Total from fishing -- 9695 (87.7%)
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1944
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 6982

Curtis Cove Report - Aug 3, 2012

Friday August 3, 8:30AM. Blue skies and the promise of a hot day.

8:30AM was a good time to be here this day!

A few splashes of fresh green rock algae and tumbled pebbles. Some energy hit the cove during the past week. New moon had just passed, and brought with it a very high tide.

Even without storms, a lunar high tide can pack a wallop

The deep soaking saturated the fine, mud-like sand. Pools of water stood amid the intertidal cobbles low on the foreshore, struggling to drain back to the ocean.

Amid the cobbles, a bog

Sadly, again the purpose of my visit was made clear quickly enough.

Lobster trap vinyl coating

Amid the wrack -- and even standing alone like this -- plastics glittered. So what did my collection bring, all told? A lot, again.

67 pcs of rope, about 45 ft total

314 pcs of non-rope debris

392 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 1 (heavy cornerpiece)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 67
• Fishing trap gear: 239 (230 vinyl trap coating scraps, 3 trap parts, 3 bait bags, 3 bumpers)
• Fishing misc.: 20 (17 claw bands, bait lid? scrap, 2 fishing lines)
• Food-related plastics: 15 (2 bottle scraps, 2 bottle-cap o-rings, 10 SOLO cup scraps, PE juice spout)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 15 (4 bag scraps, mylar balloon, latex balloon, 2 jug scraps, hairband fragment, tire scrap, toy barn? scrap, shovel handle, bowl bottom, sack scrap, "Bon Bon" plant tag)
• Scrap plastics: 30 (12 >1", 18 <1")
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (fabric scraps)

A couple standouts for the weird and wacky things that wind up in the ocean.

"Bon bon" plant/flower tag

Star-shaped mylar balloon, paint gone

Worn, rounded toy barn(?) pc

Battered SOLO cup

All of the above show different ways that plastics age in the ocean. The printing on the plant-pot tag has faded. The mylar balloon is yellowed & all the paint gone. The toy scrap's edges have been smoothed and rounded off by years of bouncing around the seabed. SOLO cups always tend to split vertically into slivers like the one above has. (One wonders where the rest of the cup is.)

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 6788
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1717
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 3009

Curtis Cove Report - Jul 23, 2012

Beginning a closer look at the continuing cleanups of Curtis Cove, Biddeford. Here's the first installment!

Saved from development last fall and placed into the hands of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, Curtis Cove should be a pristine place, free from human intrusion. It isn't. On February 22 I got to a clean "base line" along a small 150-ft section of this polluted cove. As of last week, 5312 new pieces of manmade debris had washed in since then!

Following last week's catch-up post, here is Monday, July 23. Gray skies and heavy air. 8:30AM, low tide. A flat upper terrace of fine gray sand, sloping quickly off to a cobbly & green intertidal zone.

Before my collection, I took a stroll down to the tide pool that rings the north side of the cove. Always something interesting there. Today: a hermit crab war...

The little guy actually won this one

A new, bright-orange life form hanging out amid the rockweed...

A sea squirt, possibly the invasive Botrylloides violaceous 

And of course, this...

Far too many plastic flecks to count overall

Back up at my 150-ft beach zone, some of the week's debris was easy to see...

And some lay nestled amid the wrack:

All told, this is what my hour on the beach landed me yesterday:

68 pcs of rope, about 55 ft total

405 pcs of non-rope debris

473 pieces total:

• Bldg material/furniture: 1 (grommet)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 71 (68 mostly short, frayed rope strands, 3 small net fragments)
• Fishing trap gear: 298 (277 lobster trap vinyl scraps, 11 mangled steel trap parts, 5 trap bumpers, 3 bait bags, 1 trap tag, 1 trap vent)
• Fishing misc.: 25 (clawbands)
• Food-related plastics: 17 (1 bottlecap o-ring, 1 straw, 10 cup scraps, 3 food wrappers, 2 cutlery handles)
• Food-related glass/metal: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 19 (4 bag scraps, 1 balloon scrap, 2 cigarettes, 1 bandaid, 1 saw handle, 2 cable ties, 1 crate seal, 4 cord scraps, 1 air filter scrap, 1 duct tape, 1 big tire patch)
• Scrap plastics: 34 (13 >1", 21 <1")
• Paper/wood: 2 (paper scraps)
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 6 (5 fabric scraps, 1 glove)

Of the above, perhaps 2 pieces were local drops -- the cigarettes. Everything else most likely washed in. Now as maddening as these bits of vinyl from lobster traps are...

...at least you can see how they get into the ocean. But, a saw handle?

How does that happen? This has been the big wake-up at Curtis Cove -- the amount of things that by no rights should enter the ocean, but have. And will. And will keep washing up as long as they're made out of persistent, permanent plastic.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 5785
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1612
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 2396

Curtis Cove Update

Back in May I described my new venture, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, Maine. Owned by the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, Curtis Cove is supposed to be a pristine, untouristed habitat & place of beauty untouched by humanity.

Unfortunately, with the abuse the Gulf of Maine receives, humanity leaves its mark with every high tide. After several weeks of heavy scouring, I reached a clean "baseline" for my 150-foot stretch of cove back on February 22. Since then I've been going most every week to see what washes in. It's staggering.

With my work at Bay View in Saco now finished for the time being, I wanted to get the blog on Curtis Cove caught up. So, without further ado, the basic results thus far. (Note: These photos don't show the fishing rope that I've collected each week; being now 1544 pieces, about 1/2 mile of rope & counting, they're in many garbage bags in our condo's storage area.)

Feb 29 - 249 pcs (inc. 153 fishing rope)

Mar 7 - 158 pcs (inc. 87 fishing rope)

Mar 13 - 215 pcs (inc. 87 fishing rope)

Mar 30 - 526 pcs (inc. 38 fishing rope)

Apr 4 - 303 pcs (inc. 95 fishing rope)

Apr 10 - 260 pcs (inc. 89 fishing rope)

Apr 26 - 81 pcs (inc. 33 fishing rope)

May 7 - 148 pcs (inc. 72 fishing rope)

May 17 - 272 pcs (inc. 107 fishing rope)

May 23 - 148 pcs (inc. 31 fishing rope)

May 31 - 257 pcs (inc. 28 fishing rope)

Jun 7 - 326 pcs (inc. 127 fishing rope)

Jun 15 - 451 pcs (inc. 212 fishing rope)

Jun 25 - 297 pcs (inc. 116 fishing rope)

Jul 6 - 346 pcs (inc. 145 fishing rope)

Jul 12 - 1275 pcs (inc. 124 fishing rope)

And there you go. The story of the past half year. Again, this is a beach that isn't touristed. Of the 5312 pieces of manmade garbage I've pulled off this little wedge of cove, maybe half a dozen were locally dropped -- a couple beer cans, a couple water bottles, a jug of orange juice. All the rest are washed in.

2119 vinyl coating scraps from lobster traps (933 of them from July 12 alone!), 167 lobster claw bands, 64 lobster trap bumpers, 61 bait bags, flower pots, part of an outdoor thermometer, 121 bag/baggie scraps, a car console, a car armrest, a fan belt, security seals/tags, a pressure-treatment tag from 1992, vinyl upholstery scraps, an air filter, a plastic coathook, 167 scraps of polystyrene coffee/drink cups/tops, a ketchup pack from a seaside lobster shack miles away, duct tape, fiberglass siding, plastic drywall anchors, 34 balloons/string.

From 150 feet of coastline. With its inlets, bays, & islands, Maine has approximately 3000 miles of coastline.

Change the game.

A Tale of Two Winters

From Dec 2010 - Feb 2011, I collected, on average 180 pieces of manmade debris at my beach, Bayview, in Saco, Maine each week.

From Dec 2011 - Feb 2012, that number was an average of 60 pieces each week!

Anyone following my Collection Reports has seen that the amount of debris I'm pulling off the beach has nosedived. It would be very tempting to see this as amazing news. I'd be tempted too, if not for all the research I'm now conducting simultaneously on a second beach further south.*

This, plus 153 individual scraps of fishing rope, came from my
second beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, for a total of 249
pieces of junk from 150 ft of shoreline. In one week in Feb.

No, the debris is still swirling in the Gulf of Maine, as fiercely as ever. But for some reason, starting in mid-November, it largely stopped washing up on Bayview beach.

Why?

There are two really intriguing possibilities. The first has to do with a strange phenomenon called internal waves. The ocean isn't one big homogenous lump of water. It is stratified -- often sharply -- with fresh, "light" layers on top and saltier, "dense" layers down below. When the stratification is strong, energy that gets put into the ocean (from storm or surface wind, etc.) can propagate along the boundaries between those layers. It's the cause of what's known as "dead water" -- when, say, a boat propellor that usually pushes the boat forward instead sends all its energy just into creating these underwater waves, and the boat hardly moves at all.

What does this have to do with beach debris? Well if the winter of 2010/11 was a time of high stratification between layers, more ocean energy may have traveled through these undersea conduits, churning up the seabottom and its debris. This huge wrackline from December 2010...

...may have gotten its beginnings from a churned-up seafloor thanks to shallow-water internal waves. Contrast that view with this winter's:

All winter long there has been almost zero seaborne wrack. No wrack = no plastic. Are the internal waves weaker this year, or even shut down? It's been an exceptionally mild winter in Maine. Freakishly mild. Does Saco Bay need bone-chilling air masses to stratify its waters in winter? We've also had fairly little rain or snow all winter long. Does the bay need fresh river runoff to stratify it?

I don't know. But it's one thought, and it's got some support from oceanographers I've spoken with.

The second thought comes from the few curious finds that have surfaced. Twice in the past month, I've pulled from the sands pulltab-era aluminum tops from old rusted-away steel cans.

2/29: Generic style used ~1970-1980

3/12: Coke can used only '71-'72

A third 30+ year-old pulltab aluminum top down in Curtis Cove makes 3 in a month! Which makes me wonder if an offshore sandbar has shifted, revealing 30-year-old flotsam and dampening the energy coming into Bayview. Just this week, at an ultralow low-tide, I snapped this muddy bar which peeked out of the water at the very edge of the tide line:

I've never seen anything like a sandbar exposed out at Bayview before. The ripples show that it's migrating landward. If it has bigger cousins just offshore, and they're steep enough to cut off inflow of seafloor debris, that may be what's stopping the debris from coming in.

As usual, I have more questions than answers. Clearly there's some energy at the beach. I've documented huge sandloads dumped up on the shore this winter, as well as several lobster traps. Yet the stuff that would get whipped up, suspended, and dragged in -- like vinyl, polystyrene, seaweed -- it's just not coming.

Whatever's keeping it from coming in, it's out there. And it will start washing into Bayview again. It's just a question of when. For the moment, it leaves me with the tantalizing question of "Why?"

---

* More specifics on this beach, Curtis Cove in Biddeford, in a future post, soon!

The Long Road

My friend Danielle of It Starts With Me and her family have picked up over 40,000 cigarette butts from Wrightsville Beach, NC. And counting.

This, by any measure in a sane world, would be insane. Knowing this, Danielle and the Cape Fear branch of Surfrider helped organize a town meeting last night to push for a ban on smoking at the beach.

Surfrider's campaign posters
are top-notch

Despite a packed house filled with a sea of supporters in blue shirts reading "Breathe Easy / Keep it Clean" (some 90% of the room supported the ban), the council voted 3-2 against.

In Portland, Maine it took until February 2012 for the city even to acknowledge that a plastic cigarette butt, loaded with a cocktail of toxic chemicals, was litter!

Monument Square, Portland, ME
(image from the Portland Press Herald online)

Let that sink in for a moment. The first rumblings of the ill-effects of cigarettes came in the 1940s. By 1970, cigarette advertising was banned from TV. The Tobacco Wars of the early 1990s ended with the universal understanding that cigarettes are dangerous, and deadly. Yet it took 20 more years for Maine's largest city to identify a cigarette butt as litter.

Last week I visited the Maine Fishermen's Forum up in Rockland at the beautiful Samoset Resort, overlooking rocky cliffs and a foggy sea. The fishing industry in the Gulf of Maine has reeled from one crisis to another for decades. Pollution, overfishing, acidification, sea-temperature rise -- these are putting tremendous pressure on fish stocks. So much of this comes back to simple mistreatment of the fishery & the environment. Yet judging by the view I saw out on the covered walkway...

100 more all around the can and snowy sidewalk

...care for the environment isn't high on the radar.

Since I started the Flotsam Diaries, I've pulled about 1/2 mile of fishing rope from local beaches.

200 more feet pulled up at Curtis Cove, Biddeford
on March 7, 2012

It's all plastic -- nylon or polypropylene. It will last forever, in some form. What I've retrieved represents the tiniest percent of what's certainly out there. I've also recorded several dozen derelict lobster traps washed up. Here's 30 or so from Goose Rocks Beach, Kennebunk, last year:

Each trap is vinyl-coated, and each slowly releases 1000 chunks of toxic polymers as the steel rusts. Conservatively there are half a million derelict lobster traps on the seafloor in the Gulf of Maine. The number is probably far higher.

Yet Maine has no regulations for monitoring lost rope. If a lobsterman loses a trap, they fill out a form. But that paper form goes into a stack, with nobody really examining where it was lost. Even if the location was known, there are ZERO funds in the state to recover any of the gear.

So the problems grow. And heads remain firmly buried in the sand.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom. More and more cities are taking cigarette litter seriously. Even Portland, finally. More and more are taking grocery-bag and other plastic litter seriously. And the state of Washington has just passed ground-breaking regulation to monitor and help clean up fishing debris. There are fingerposts and guides the world over showing the good that can happen when you admit a problem exists & then fight it like you mean it.

Change can be a long road. I know all too well that it can feel sometimes like a hopeless road. But at least it's a road. Can you imagine life if there were no roads to take you somewhere beyond where you are?