Collection Report Jan 6, 2011

Happy New Year!

After the "Christmas Storm," the weather of Dec. 30 - Jan. 6 was uneventful. What would it be flotsam-wise? It didn't take long to find out. For starters, any beach that looks like this...

Organic mush recording a receding tide

...will contain plenty of this:

Glove for scale, lines point to plastic debris in situ
along just one small section

Plus, this withered & sunbleached menu suggested that Mother Nature was still in the midst of serious detox.

Withered & sunbleached, but intact, because
it's coated in plastic!

What's the big deal about a seaside restaurant menu lost in the sea? Because The Pier Restaurant is (or was - it seems to be defunct now) in Bar Harbor, 125 miles to the northeast.

Anyway, the previous week I collected 478 finds from my utterly deserted, frozen beach. I was hoping that would come back down a bit this week. Did it? Here's Zone N:

360 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 94 (35 claw bands, 2 band fragments, 35 bits of rope, 20 lobster trap coatings, bead, bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 58 (28 bottlecap seals, 13 silverware scraps, 6 polystyrene (#6) cup scraps, 7 random cup scraps, slotted spoon, 2 sauce packs, label scrap)
• Food-related metal/glass: 7 (can + can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 187 (everything, just... everything)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 3 (2 cigarettes plus wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 10 (6 fabric scraps, 2 bits of cord, 2 other)

As with last week, no commentary needed here. Just a few pictures will do:

The confetti of life

The day of the bottle-cap seal;
and how does a slotted spoon get lost?

Another Jul 19 tag?!

Some of the fishing rope is very old

And then down to Zone S:

136 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 52 (12 claw bands, 21 rope scraps, 18 lobster trap coatings, shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 13 (2 bottlecaps, 2 #6 cup scraps, 3 bread tags, knife, wrapper bit, sauce pack, 3 scraps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 54 (inc. weatherstrip, tent rod segment, duct tape, shovel fragment, Clorox cap, 2 bits of red/white/black vinyl scraps like those found in Zone N last week)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 8 (glove, 4 fabric scraps, 1 hand warmer, 2 bits of string/cord)

Even in winter Zone S stays lighter than Zone N. Does this mean Zone N's waters are filled with remnants of busy summers, slowly regurgitated back in winter? Does it mean that the micro-currents around Zone S lend themselves to less garbage? The shore at Zone S is a bit narrower than Zone N - does that matter? Don't know -- but I'm working on it. I do know that the kinds of debris at both are very similar. Here's a few closeups:

Zone S's colorful confetti

Mmmm, toxins

And much more fishing debris

Including this ancient piece; yes, that
furry loop has a heart of rope

And there you go. The find count did come down. From 478 finds to 476.

In two weeks in the heart of winter on a quiet Maine beach, I've plucked up nearly 1,000 pieces of manmade garbage. Along 500 feet of tideline. Some may be remnants of summer's revelry; some has clearly washed in from many miles away. And it just keeps coming.

A parting thought for this week. I pulled up 242 pieces of fishing debris in the past two weeks. What's missing from this picture?

Surf, Isle, ...

That's right, fishing buoys, fishing boats, fishermen. To the edge of the horizon at Saco Bay I have never seen a buoy, trawler, lobster boat. There is no commercial scale fishing in Saco Bay as far as my eye can make out.

To reach my shore, each claw band, shotgun wadding, coating from a ruined trap, or fragment of rope has to travel for miles. When you think about the vastness of the Gulf of Maine, and the tiniest of my bit of shoreline, each scrap in my hand is an impossibility -- it's hitting PowerBall. If I've hit PowerBall this many times, how much else is still out there?

Deconstructing a Winter Storm

So the last several weeks have been weird at the beach. When the storms are their most violent, the flotsam is nonexistent. When the weeks are the calmest, litter runneth over. What gives?

Well, by chance, I found a big clue in another blog.

5 Gyres is a group of scientists & marine adventurers, with a twist. They raise awareness about ocean pollution by actually getting out in the oceans and documenting it. One gyre at a time, they're proving to a skeptical world that every last corner of our planet is infected by the plague of plastic waste. And that we have to do something about it.

In November they set sail from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, across the South Atlantic Gyre to Cape Town, South Africa. En route they set out scores of trawls to capture flotsam. Sadly, every single trawl brought in plastics - even in the middle of the ocean, 1500 miles from land.

from http://5gyres.org/posts/2010/12/04/
rising_from_the_deep_plastic

Sad, eye-opening, and a blog that's VERY worth reading from beginning to end. A pretty epic adventure.

But for my purposes, one part especially hit home. Early in their voyage they hit days of horrible weather - raging wind & seas. And guess what? All that energy in the ocean? It pushes things down in the water column. Their trawls still found plastic, but it was almost invisible on the water's surface.

So maybe when huge storms rise in the Gulf of Maine, all that energy does the same thing - pushes floating bits down toward the seafloor, where they have a hard time washing in to shore?

The other possibility is that they wash in to shore just fine, but are quickly buried by the same kind of brute force that can do this.

That's not supposed to happen

After all, I've pulled out plenty of three-foot-long fishing rope scraps that only had 2-3 inches exposed. And I've watched something as light as a dry old leaf stay put while Mother Nature's winds piled sand on top.

If it can happen to a leaf...

So what's happening at Bay View beach when a storm comes in? Probably, as always, a combination of both of the above -- along with a dozen other things. And as I've shown, my understanding of the whole shebang is... limited. But at least I'm in good company. The best minds in the world are only now starting to unlock the mysteries of how oceans work, and how important their health is to life as we know it.

It's great to be along for the ride.

Collection Report Dec 8-9, 2010

Welcome to Bay View beach, on a sunny 28-degree December 8.

Bright sun helps when it's 28; as do 3 layers

It had been another week of heavy storms and winds from the SE -- from the ocean. High tide was near, and nature was very much on display.

December on a deserted beach can be magical

But, just like the previous week, there wasn't much garbage to see. A stroll along a clean beach is always a nice treat. Still, I didn't dare to hope that "I didn't find it" meant "It's not there."

I decided I had to come back to check out the low-tide line; that way I'd know for sure what was there. So, I did. The next day, December 9, was my birthday. And at 9:30AM on my birthday (at a balmy 21 degrees!), I arrived back to Bay View to this:

Really?

Really???

I guess there is just no cutoff date for thoughtlessness. But I can't get my head around hot chocolate, a Pepsi from the local Pizza Hut, and half a dozen raw eggs on a 20-degree night.

Well, what can you do? As it turns out, that was about the only new junk there was to see. All the expected low-tide-line debris? Barely a scrap.

So, as with December 8, I used the time to soak in more of nature's works.

Sea trees du jour

"Cobbled" together by nature, just cuz

Anyway, business at hand. The Zone N haul:

28 finds:

• Building materials: 1 (chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 1 (scrap of lobster trap)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (lid, whole Pepsi cup from Pizza Hut, w/ straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 7 (sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 5 (kite string reel, 2 wrapper scraps, end-of-finger bandaid, white scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 5 (egg carton, coffee cup, cup sleeve, 2 gum wrappers)
• Misc./unique: 2 (long pink string, waistband)

Pretty much nothing to say about this lot. What about Zone S?

21 finds:

• Building material: 4 (chunk asphalt, chunk of burned asphalt, 2 bits of bathroom tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 5 (bits of lobster trap coatings)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 10 (2 aluminum scraps, 2 sea glass, 6 fresh glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 1 (small blue scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Again, little ooh/ahh factor. Except perhaps:

Life, the universe, & everything?

OK. So, two weeks of storm, wind, & tidal madness that does this to a bench at Ocean Park, a mile to the north:

Glad I don't have to dig this out

Yet over two days I find only a few dozen objects, many of which came from some local miscreants.

Why so little? Well, one of three reasons:

• The Gulf of Maine is strikingly clean. 
• The storms actually kept trash offshore.
• The storms buried the debris under a foot of sand.

Which is it? I'm already working up a post answering that. But I'll give you a hint. It isn't #1.

Collection Report Dec 1-2, 2010

Welcome back to Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. December 1 was mild, mid-40s, but blustery. (In fact, a gust clocked at 41 mph.) Gray clouds were gathering, so I snuck in before the rains -- and the next high tide.

The flats at low tide

Remember the two tide lines & the berm of just one week before? All that stuff I thought I was figuring out about how the contour of the beach was changing? Well, do you see any of that in the picture below?

Me neither

Clearly I have a lot to learn about how wind & tide, current & rain really behave. Here's one thing I did discover. The winds buffeting me on Dec. 1 were largely from the SE; they were blowing in, fiercely at times, off the ocean. Pushing the tide unnaturally high, and blasting the heck out of the prior week's landscape.

At first I thought this meant another bumper crop of debris, fishing rope, boats, you name it. But it wasn't to be. Bay View had been assaulted by forces that can bury 3 feet of fishing rope without a thought.

What do you mean three feet?

Oh, that's what you mean.

It was dumb luck that I found that bit of rope. Most anything else? Blown away or buried deep. In the end, my trash bags were very light.

On December 2, I decided to take another quick swing by. The lay of the land looked much the same. The wind had raised foot-high sand drifts in places. And did other weird things.

Sand blows, but leaf doesn't blow?

When I spotted this leaf, I knew this week's collection would be hopeless. A light, dry leaf didn't blow away, but the sand did blow across and nearly cover it. WTH?

A short walk up Zones N & S proved I was right. Very little debris to be found. Not that it wasn't there, just that it couldn't be seen.

So, a collection of Zone N:

37 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (2 fence slats, 1 chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6 (inc. a piece from the boat insulation)
• Fishing misc.: 8 (7 scraps of rope, 1 claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle caps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (aluminum can, can scrap, 2 bits of sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 11 (3 scraps of packaging, 2 bits of grocery bags, 3 hard plastic scraps, 1 scrap of boundary tape, 1 tiny bit of balloon, 1 sm. red hard plastic bit)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (scrap of fabric, freshly-lost tennis ball (dog toy?))

A bunch of usual suspects. Though, to be honest, 37 is more than I thought I'd collected. It doesn't take long to add up.

On to Zone S:

18 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (fence slat, chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 4 (shotgun shell wadding, 2 bits of rope, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (bag scrap, green soldier, tampon applicator, bandaid, tie-band, clear scrap, green scrap, yellow scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Quick closeup of the small, but delightfully varied, non-food plastics:

Would be OK not finding another tampon applicator

So this week, I was well & truly schooled. Nov. 24-25 had put assumptions in my head that didn't last seven days. Which just proves that it might be a bit early for me to be making assumptions. Still, every idea that we get wrong gets us one step closer to getting it right.

Besides, I like a world that's full of surprises.

The Storm after the Calm

Ever sit down to write about a recent event, and realize you just don't have the photo you need? November 24 at Bay View beach, Saco, Maine, was 41° F. A stiff northerly wind gusted over 30 mph. Many times I had to turn my face to duck a sandblast. And my trash bag kept trying to pull free from my hand, hoping to scatter my finds back to the shore. But do you see any of that in this picture?

Looks like a lovely beach day, no?

Still, there is proof. Angry wind & wave had carried in a piece of flotsam most unlooked-for. Remember the chunk of fiberglass from last week? It was just the leading edge of a much bigger, and heavier, surprise.

Is there still more lurking?

This battered 6 ft x 5 ft fiberglass hull fragment is now the second partial boat that I've found washed up. It had no markings on what was left of it, no personal effects. Most likely, it simply ripped away from a mooring and broke up a long time ago, with no loss of any crew. Still, I'll be just as happy not to find a third.

Mother Nature is kicking into gear. The shoreline is fast changing. Summer's sands are being blown & washed back down into the waves, steepening the slope dramatically. There are now two tide lines, with a berm grown in-between.

Two kelp rows (center and far right)

Still, for all the bluster, last week was the lightest haul I'd ever had. Could I hope for a repeat performance?

No. Beyond pieces of seacraft, this day quickly dispelled any cautious optimism I may have had. The tide line teemed with trash. Battered, abused, abraded trash. Every few steps, another piece popped out.

A scene of lobster claw bands...

...and frayed fishing rope...

...and shredded plastic cups

An hour and a half later, I'd only managed to scour the berm, not the whole beach. (Granted, I'd lost time dragging the boat carcass to the trash bin in the parking lot.) I decided to return the next day (Thanksgiving) to hit the rest.

Thanksgiving morning was only 33°, but it was bright and calm. I started with a stroll back to the tide line, just to see if I'd missed anything the day before. And within seconds I was off to the races again. Dozens upon dozens more bits and bobs were sitting pretty.

Driftwood threading the needle

Cheerrful plastic gem button

Which pebble doesn't belong?

An hour later, I'd still only managed to hit the tide lines again. In two days, I never got time to walk carefully up and down from wave to dune. (Though a cursory walk suggested the wind had left little to be found.)

In much the same way, there are too many interesting finds from this week to fit in this post. As a teaser for the forthcoming collection report, here's what I hauled in.

Zone N

Zone S

And as with the shotgun shell from last week, there is no doubt that much of this had ridden the waves for months (or years) before arriving back on my shore.

Sauce packs and egg sacs

Keep in mind, all of this comes from two small sections of beach. Two small sections that I have visited -- and scoured --almost every week since June. My part of southern Maine sits far away from any of the great gyres of the world. Yet the refuse of our artificial life just keeps coming in. Look down at your feet. What do you see?