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.