Collection Report - October 8, 2013

Tuesday, October 8. 8:00AM. Just after low tide. Bright tide, low-50s.

This was the day after big, sustained windstorm that ran most of the day on Monday. Evidence for the energy was widespread at the beach. The tides easily overtopped the old summer berms at the back of the foreshore, leaving clumps of large wrack behind.

The pounding surf cut & scoured out a big cliff into the soft sand & cobbles at the back of the foreshore.

The weather left very interesting patterns of sand and rain on the beach. It was obvious where the highest of high tides from mid-da Monday splashed all the way up to the back of the cobbles. These were pelted by rain drops as that tide receded Monday afternoon. But then after midnight Tuesday, when the next high tide came in, the rain had stopped. The winds were lower & the tide didn't reach as far. As it receded there were no more raindrops.

Quite striking to see multiple times & tides etched into the sand, and to be able to read it like a book.

All of Monday's activity, plus the coming cold, seems to have stirred up life at the beach. Down on the low foreshore, crab and snail tracks interspersed with gull footprints:

Higher & dryer on the backshore, another denizen of the dunes:

So with all the changes happening on the beach, and all the energy, what would that mean for the finds?

15 pcs of rope, about 20 ft total

198 pcs of nonrope debris

213 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 15
• Fishing misc.: 163 (149 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, vent, 2 bait bags, 4 trap parts, 7 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 9 (4 small cup scraps, 2 food wrappers, locally-dropped yogurt tubs, six-pack ring, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 3 (fresh aluminum beer cans, shotgunned)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 9 (3 baggies, latex balloon, long red string, 2 cigarette packaging, umbrella base, fabric swatch)
• Scrap plastics: 8 ( 4 > 1" , 4 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (2 sea glass, chunk of aluminum)

A strange day. For one thing, local stuff. Including three spiked-and-shotgunned beer cans:

As expected, big stuff did ride the high waves in. Trap vent, bait bags, chunks of rope. But I was surprised how much lobster trap vinyl there still was amid the masses.

Big day: broke the 10,000-piece mark for my Year 2 at Curtis Cove! And the year's just half over.

Anyway, time moves on and the sea is always changing.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 10061
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1877
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 6272

Collection Report June 6, 2012

After six months of lull, nature re-awoke at Bay View beach on Sunday, June 3. I took my daughter to check out the high tide. But after seeing what it was doing, we didn't stay long.

My daughter enjoying the view & sea-foam for a moment

This was a no-name storm, little predicted before, little reported afterward. Inland, it was wet & windy, but unremarkable. At the shore, the violence was palpable. And hitting as it did at one of the month's highest high tides, it left this in its wake (pics from June 4):

Washed in from far away

In one or two hours, fierce waves completely remade a beach that had been slowly built up and shaped and tweaked over months. Different parts of the beach handled the onslaught differently.

Massive erosion against the seawalls
that protect homes S of my usual zones

While Bay View's advancing dune held
much sand steady even tho taking a hit

When a storm wave bangs against a seawall, the energy ricochets, hurling back toward the sea and pulling masses of sand with it. Meanwhile, dunegrass disperses much of that energy, sinking it into the sands and breaking it up, so less gets pulled back out to the deep. A seawall is a death knell to a beach. In the above picture, you can see the post stumps of an earlier seawall that had to be abandoned decades ago. How long will this one last?


As expected, the violence of the storm left much manmade litter behind, caught up in the dunes and higher ground:

Congrats, you landed.

Is this 2 pcs, or 2,000?

So when I did my full clean-up on Wed., June 6, what did I find? Well, Zone N:

136 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 114
• Fishing misc.: 6 (2 buoys, 1 scrap buoy, 1 rope, 1 lobster claw band, 1 fishing line)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (2 bottles, 1 gallon-sized juice jug, 2 bottlecaps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (aluminum can, beer bottle)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 8 (3 bag scraps, 4 balloons, 1 non-food packaging)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (wine bottle cork - true cork)

The large chunks of foam aren't consumer-product foam. They're insulation and backing, ripped from structures somewhere far away. Almost all of this was up amid the dunegrass.

On to Zone S:

114 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 93
• Fishing misc.: 6 (1 buoy, 2 buoy scraps, 1 plastic rope, 1 non-plastic rope bit, shotgun shell)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (2 bottles, plastic cork, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (aluminum can)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 9 (4 bag scraps, shoulder strap cushion, 2 flip-flops, mixing cup, insulin syringe)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 1 (wood fence slat)
• Misc./unique: 0

More of the structural foam. More of the same everything. (The syringe with its very sharp needle poking out was sobering.) There was little difference between Zones N & S this week -- the storm saw to that!

Sooner or later, every shoreline wakes from its occasional "dream of peace." Bay View woke up on June 3, 2012. The sandbar that spent months approaching, and finally beaching -- building cusps higher than even the fronts of the dunes by May -- was obliterated in a few hours. The shoreface utterly scoured & changed in the blink of an eye.

The ocean is a pitiless, wondrous thing.

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.

A tale of loss, litter, and gridlock

3189 A1 0319 ME 05 EEZ Z:F
8743 A1 0037 ME 07 EEZ Z:G
??13 A1 0645 ME 08 Z:F
0003369 ME 03 NC
???? A1 0189 ME 09 Z:G EEZ
846 ME 00 EEZ
3754 0445 ME 02 EEZ
???? 0344 ME ?? ????
72595 0754 ME 03 EEZ

No, your Web browser isn't freaking out. The codes above come from plastic tags attached to derelict lobster traps, washed up along the shores of Ocean Park.

These hulks litter the beach. As well as hundreds of pounds of rope and shredded bits of metal caging hopelessly tangled amid the carcasses.

So far I've found more than a dozen relatively intact ones, and dozens more scraps and shreds (which admittedly required walking some 7 to 8 blocks instead of 2). The true scale is probably much greater, as the sands are expert at hiding the sharp, rusted, twisted remains.

Each one of these crumpled, crushed, and torn boxes tells a story. As do the codes on the tags. After some digging, I've learned how to decipher them, largely. Let's take a complete one:

8743 A1 0037 ME 07 EEZ Z:G

8743 is the owner's license #.

A1 is the American Lobster Management area for MA/ME.

0037 is (I believe) the trap #.

ME 07 says the tag was registered for the year 2007.

EEZ = "Exclusive Economic Zone" - a zone 12-200 mi. from shore.

Z:G is Maine's zone G -- from NH border to roughly Portland.

What's striking is how many of these traps come from EEZ -- that is, at least 12 miles off the coast. One can imagine the tortured tale. Each of these traps at some point tore free from its buoy, then scraped and rolled along the seabed until eventually washing up on shore -- in at least one case (ME 00) seemingly a decade-long trip! It's sobering to consider how many more are in the deeps, waiting their turn.

What else struck me was -- why are they still here? These rotting, dangerous, disintegrating hulks are still there at the beach, visit after visit. Why doesn't anyone take them away?

It turns out, it's illegal. According to Title 12, Part 9, Subpart 2, Chapter 619, Subchapter 2 of Maine's Statutes, it is an offense to remove a trap from the beach without getting written permission from the Commissioner of Marine Resources first. A law originally meant to keep lobstermen from hassling each others' traps could now result in up to $6000 in fines for removing a dozen derelict and broken traps currently fouling a beautiful beach.

How safe do you feel, knowing that this might be under your daughter's feet?

Return trip

You know what it's like. You get an idea, it seems great. You noodle it in the evenings while some lousy TV show is on in the background. You make plans, you set goals, you feel energized. Then a day goes by, and another. And the passion fades, and for a while you feel guilty. "I really should stick with that, tonight I'm going to sit down and make more plans." A few more days of intra-cranial negotiations go by. Eventually it's just some silly random idea you had once, and you've moved on to the next shiny thing.

This has been my world. I was going to learn Latin. I started in 1997. To date I still can't effectively read a sentence in high Latin. I was going to get a Master's in history or archaeology. I've been "seriously checking out" graduate programs since about 1995.

That's why it struck me so oddly that, a week or so after my first roundup of debris, I felt the urge growing to go back and collect more. Then I did something completely out of character. I got up and did it.

It had only been days. But the beach had changed. Dramatically.

Mid-March had brought more brutal storms. The raging ocean had hurled a foot of sand 100 feet up the shore, burying the benches by the edge of the dunes. Hundreds of live clams had also been dislodged and were cast upon the beach, to rot or become gull food. Amongst them and the kelp row, more debris of the human variety.

My daughter didn't mind. She thoroughly enjoyed her piece of picket fencing.

For me, it was another heavy garbage bag after another all-too-brief amble. A hat. A glove. A sock. Dozens more of those bright rubber bands. Trawler rope. Everywhere, trawler rope. A broken water gun. Another shotgun shell. A filter (oil or air, not sure). Bottles, aluminum cans, coffee lids, a tattered Halls mint pack.

Same two block area, same drop in the bucket. So many questions. How did they get here? Was it the storms and the wind - or was this happening all the time? What washed up from the ocean? What blew in from a neighbor's trash can? What had been lost on the beach one warm day last summer? And the biggie: is it just getting worse & worse, or can a guy and a trash bag do something about it?

If I'd had doubts before, I didn't now. Tolkien, in his backstory to The Lord of the Rings -- the mythology behind the tale -- spoke of "the flame imperishable." Well, "imperishable" is a strong term, but that day on the beach helped me understand the imagery of the kindled flame.

I was in for the long haul. And I had a lot of learning to do.