Collection Report Feb 13-15, 2012

February 13, 2012. 2PM, an hour or so before high-tide. Yet another bright, sunny day. A very cold morning, so I left my collection bags at home, figuring everything would be iced hard to the ground. I figured wrong.

No ice here!

Oh well. I stuck around to survey the landscape. There had definitely been energy here, at least judging by the pebbles sculpted & blasted up onto the beach face. But...

Lake Placid?

...Where on earth was that energy? All the way out to the horizon, the sea surface on this day was as glazed and dead as it's been all winter.

The answer is fairly simple. The energy's been where it's been all winter, when it's been around at all. On the seafloor. The swash zone (where the high tide waves break and splash up the slope) was littered with shell, pebbles, gravel -- all heavy, dense seafloor debris.

What isn't typical about this week is one way that energy manifested itself on the 13th:

The artist at work

The ocean has cast up pebble mounds before. But always in even rows, spaced consistently down the beach. Never one massive headland of cobbles and pebbles sitting all on its own! Yet again, nature amazes.

At any rate, given the lack of bags on my person on the 13th, I came back on the 15th. About 9:45AM, an hour after low-tide. In one sense the view was the same:

This actually is a different pic from the first,
look at the tide!

In another sense it was quite different:

That's where the rock pile was two days before;
by the 15th, blown utterly out of existence

What a world. Anyway, the wracklines were about the same, and the finds among them seemed about the same. So with that prelude, on to them. Zone N:

52 finds:

• Building materials: 23 (20 asphalt, 2 tile, 1 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 13 (7 rope, 4 claw bands, 1 monofilament line, 1 trap vinyl coating scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 9 (seaglass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (plastic plug, tieback)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (fabric scraps)

Can't pretend there's much interesting here, except maybe the big haul of asphalt.

Down to Zone S:

63 finds:

• Building materials: 27 (7 brick, 20 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3
• Fishing misc.: 5 (3 rope - 1 v large, 2 monofilaments)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 8 (7 sea glass, foil wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 8 (bandaid, plastic lumber, engine belt, 2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric scraps, metal fencing)

The badly tortured plastic bottle still had its cap on, but scrapes on its underside had opened it & filled it with sand. Surely a long-suffering wash-in. As were the very grubby and frayed bits of rope (which I also found in Zone N above). The seaglass was a treat, as it's still rare to find more than one or two, no matter what the sea state.

So a varied week. Dead waves, yet heavy seafloor energy -- heavy enough to bring up asphalt, brick, glass, stone. Curiously, no tubeworm casings. Wherever in the surf zone these little homebuilders live, they escaped the week's fury. As did the densest/heaviest of plastics -- the vinyls. Only one, maybe two examples. The plastic that did wash in was limited to less dense varieties, oddly.

And again, no seaweed. Which is the bellwether. If energy strikes the seafloor where there's sea colander & kelp growing, it churns it up. Along with the plastics stuck amongst it. The two go hand in hand. This week, the energy didn't hit the seaweed zone.

Why does seafloor energy hit different parts of the seafloor in different weeks? The answer seems to be one of the keys in predicting where & how debris will wash in. Oh well. Live and learn.

Collection Report Feb 6-7, 2012

Monday, Feb. 6, 3:30PM. Low-tide. Brilliant late sun with its long shadows:

A whole lot of bright blue sky, and a whole lot of nothing else. The only thing to see was a dry "wrack" line of landborne reeds. The final gasp of the large sand-dump from two weeks before lay as a very faint sandbar just seaward from the foreshore. Otherwise, the beach was back to normal. No rocky strewn-field, no starfish, no tube-worm casings by the thousands. Just soft sand spread along from dune to terrace.

A lovely day for a walk, but dismal for collecting flotsam.

On a hunch, I stopped by again Tuesday. The difference a day makes. Noon, an hour past high-tide. Mostly cloudy, 40s again, slight onshore breeze, and another weak, low high-tide line. But... fresh seaborne wrack!

Overnight the Bay dumped a batch of fresh, seafloor "sea colander."

See? It sinks

All winter long there has been nothing floating into Bay View. Everything that gets kicked up is from different parts of the seafloor. In that regard, this week was the same as the past two months. But at least this week some combination of magic churned up the seabed and dragged in a few things of interest from the watery grave. First, Zone N:

78 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (7 brick, 2 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 25
• Fishing misc.: 9 (5 rope scraps, 2 clawbands, lure bag scrap, shotgun shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 6 (2 bottlecap o-rings, 2 Solo cup scraps, food wrapper, fork)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 17 (plastic glove, swiffer scrap, 2 toy scraps, battery/cartridge cover, silk flower, toggle weight ?, 5 scraps >1", 5 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 10 (9 cigarettes, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (fabric swatch)

A lot of foam, but none of it showed signs of sea voyage. Probably bits and pieces blown in from up and down the shore, out of garbage cans or freed from dunes. The other, non-foam plastics showed signs of being ocean-borne. And like I said, they were all dense, sunken plastics tossed up from the seabottom.

Zone S:

30 finds:

• Building materials: 9 (6 asphalt, wood offcut, tile, concrete)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, bait bag)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (bottlecap o-ring, 3 food wrapper scraps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (can)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (balloon w/ string, 2 large vinyl upholstery scraps, 2 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 2 (cloth strip, leather offcut)

Those upholstery scraps were some of the most brutalized, tortured pieces of vinyl I've ever seen. Whatever their story, I'm sure it's a doozy.

Still, flotsam-wise there really is no comparison between Winter '11 and Winter '12. The same can be said weather-wise. Are the two related? Does warmer air shut down the systems that normally drag thousands of bits of plastic into the bay? Does less snow/rain = less river runoff = changed circulation patterns? I don't know. But it's worth looking into.

Collection Report April 14, 2011

Bay View, on a bright, sunny April 14.

1:40PM. 60 degrees F. Low, low tide again

Wait. Something's missing from last week...

Where are all the rocks?

Those thousands of pebbles gathered into mounds? Gone. All in one week. Maybe in one tide? Whether reburied or rescattered or pulled out to the depths, almost nothing was left in their wake. In fact, in all of Bay View, one thing had floated in and stayed:

Behold: Sea lettuce!

Dull. Here's what I was able to "cobble" together for a collection of Zone N:

15 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt chunks - likely leftover from April 7)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3 (insulation, packing peanut, cup scrap)
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 1 (spoon)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 2 (bag scrap, sliver)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

And Zone S:

10 finds:

• Building materials: 4 (asphalt, 3 brick bits)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 2
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 1 (scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

No commentary. Really, what would be the point? Clearly Saco Bay is in a pattern where, regardless of the weather, next to nothing (organic or otherwise) is floating in. So nothing (organic or otherwise) is beaching. Leaving a Flotsam Diarist without much to do except record local drops, and wait for the next week.

Still, it was a good day to linger a bit and admire nature's unmarred palette.

A new masterpiece with every tide

After all, warmer air and longer days means exchanging these shore-side companions:

For these: