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.

Collection Report Sep 3, 2011

Well, Irene came and went. On Sunday, August 28, cutting more westerly than expected, she hit Saco Bay, Maine with her east flank. 40-50mph winds rocked the coastline all day. But the worst & last of her winds came from W/SW. From inland out to sea. Here's her waning power on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 28:

Scour (Aug. 28, 2011, 6:30PM)

And here's Bay View the next morning, after the midnight high tide had come and gone:

And rinse (Aug. 29, 2011, 8:30AM)

And there you go. Hurricane/TS Irene ruined communities up and down the east coast. But at Bay View, all she left was an utterly clean slate. Not even a dollop of seaweed. All thanks to wind direction (and maybe to the long Saco River jetty a mile down south).

The rest of the week was warm & sunny. The perfect ending to an epic Maine summer. So it's little surprise that when I got back on September 3, there was junk. Though taking away this still-smouldering Bacchanal...

Poor showing

...the haul would have been small. (Note to partiers: Dumping your plastic in an open-air bonfire doesn't make it go away. Pretty much everything you did here reflects badly on you.) As it was, the haul wasn't small. Zone N:

146 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 36
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, buoy scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 22 (4 cups, 5 food wrappers, 4 straw wrappers, 2 cup lids, 3 bottlecaps, 2 bottles, straw, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 19 (14 cans, Jaegermeister bottle, beer bottle, 2 bottlecaps, foil wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 19 (5 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, 4 toy scraps, 5 scraps >1", 4 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 35 (34 filters, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 10 (9 paper scraps, 1 wood firecracker stick)
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric pieces, battery)

After all of Irene's fury, Bay View Zone N got maybe 2-3 pieces of ocean-borne debris. A bit of rope, a buoy scrap, and maybe this stained, abraded bottle cap:

The stories you could tell...

On the other hand, Irene probably blew away 40-50 cigarette butts (edit: 40-50 from Zone N; probably hundreds from the rest of Bay View), and who knows what else?

Zone S, always low on litter this year, offers little more enlightenment:

28 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 19 (!)
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rope twine)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (scrap of spoon/fork, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

The only thing of note: the spike in styrofoam over the usual Zone S finds.

A day after the storm, I watched a video of a 140-year-old covered bridge in Vermont washing away into splinters from the raging torrents. That was Irene's reality for so many of my fellow Northeasterners. At Bay View beach, ~20 pieces of styrofoam may well be the best -- the only -- evidence for Irene. With that, and the removal of one wonky tree along the 3-mile route between my condo and the beach, she was well and truly gone from Saco, Maine. We got lucky. My heart goes out to those who didn't.