Collection Report - February 4, 2014

I stopped by on January 28. But the sea was bone-frozen, a giant ice block, but a beautiful day. So I came back a week later. Tuesday, February 4, 2014. 10:15AM. 2 hrs after a very low low tide.

Weather still a struggle this winter. Cold and messy. This day the temp was only in the upper 20s and still very icy. But there had been good melting from the weekend, so at least I had a chance to get at something.

From what I could see of the beach, it was just old wrack there, nothing new had washed in. Lots of pebbles & cobbles were exposed down low. Good banding of wave lines and wrack, and decent sorting. And a beautiful rippling of wave lines as last high-tide went out.

Weekend's rainspots meet morning's tide line

There were chunks of wrack sticking out of the sand all along the backshore, meaning a lot of fine sand had come in and buried what was there. It had been a beach-building couple of weeks, rather than winter's usual beach-eroding.

There was also a ridiculous amount of rusted metal bits of lobster traps, never seen that much on the beach at once! Heavy, bulky chunks just all over the shore.

What kind of a day was it?

45 pcs of rope, about 40 ft total

111 pcs of nonrope debris

156 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 45
• Fishing misc.: 86 (16 vinyl trap coatings, 62 trap parts!, 3 bumpers, 4 bait bags, clawband)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (4 cup scraps, wrapper scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 6 (2 new locally dropped cans, 1 small can scrap, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (cable tie)
• Scrap plastics: 11 ( 9 > 1" , 2 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 2 (glove, fabric scrap)

62 rusted chunks of lobster trap washed up! Never happened before. A very weird week for that.

I wish I had been able to unlock the ice at the backshore to fully clear the beach, but for the weather I had, I'm pleased with what I was able to pull off & show.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 11646
• Total from fishing -- 10136 (87.0%)
• Pcs fishing rope -- 2059
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 7174

Collection Report - September 23, 2013

Monday, September 23. 8:30AM. Right at low-tide. Bright sun. 55 degrees. Colors of the bushes along the backshore starting to change as fall begins to take hold. Still pink, purple, red, & white blooms on the beach roses.

This day I saw some erosion at back of foreshore. Heavier bits of seaweed had been tossed up & clumped there. And a small cliff had formed from waves pounding into back of foreshore and dragging back some of the softer sand.

The low-foreshore rocks had a pretty unsorted/jumbled look to them. August's cusps & mounds had been smeared and flattened out. There was lots of larger tossed-up wrack. And amidst that I found new pieces of rope, the first bits of newly washed-in rope that I'd seen in some months. That only seems to happen here when there's been true energy coming in. That same energy seems to have been what's scoured the sand back. Things changing as summer turns to autumn.

And as summer forage turned to autumn fruits, out have come the deer!

I tracked out four sets of deer prints on the beach! Pressed deeply & freshly into the soft sand at the backshore. Two large prints, two small prints. Sometime just overnight judging by how fresh the tracks were. I love this beach.

Someone else loves this beach. I found the carapace of a cooked lobster amid a rock ring. Looking at its shell, I see why it was cooked.

This lobster has the dreaded "shell disease" -- a parasite that damages lobster shells but leaves the meat untainted. It's still fit to eat, but nobody would want to buy a lobster that looked like that. The lobsterman who caught this possibly cooked it up for his family.

Shell disease decimated southern New England's lobster fishery starting in 1999. It's creeping northward. If it hits the Gulf of Maine with full force, the lobster industry is in real trouble.

Well, the higher energy this week would usually mean less debris left behind than in recent weeks. Did it?

50 pcs of rope, about 50 ft total

326 pcs of nonrope debris

376 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 50
• Fishing misc.: 253 (237 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 4 trap parts, bait bag, bumper, 10 clawbands)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (2 bottlecap seals, 18 cup scraps, 2 bread tags, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 14 (cigarette, bandaid, 6 cable ties, 2 cords, 4 anchors)
• Scrap plastics: 34 ( 11 > 1" , 23 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 0

Disturbingly, 243 pieces of lobster trap was indeed far less than what I'd been averaging for the previous month. 326 pieces of garbage coming off an untouristed beach. And that's a "good day."

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9320
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1862
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5667

Collection Report - September 15, 2013

Saturday September 15. 1:15PM, near low tide. Mid-60s, nice seabreeze. Mostly sunny. Fall-like crisp air.

Beach looking still a lot like September 7. If maybe a bit more "unkempt." The live algae down low on the foreshore was still there -- though getting more muddled & ripped up. The low foreshore a jumble of cobbles & pebbles & boulders.

Higher against back of foreshore August's clusters & clumps of pebble-sized rocks were still there. But matted down. "Aging." Smushing themselves back down, unrestored by the late summer's weak waves.

Sadly those weak waves brought their payload of vinyl lobster trap bits again.

This time instead of up against the back of the foreshore, the bulk was strewn amid the standing water and boulders of the live-algae zone. A one-day slightly higher tide seems to have had enough energy to first spill over the foreshore berm, and then partially drag some of the vinyl load back down.

But again, there was no energy for bringing in large & heavy things like rope. It was another zero-rope day. And another sobering day.

1151 pcs of nonrope debris

1151 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 0
• Fishing misc.: 1043 (979 vinyl lobster trap coating scraps, 5 bumpers, 5 trap parts, 54 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 30 (bottlecap, 3 bottlecap o-rings, 24 cup scraps, cutlery scrap, straw scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 11 (balloon, PhoneMate clip, Nifty Magnetic SpaceSaver Binder scrap, cord, cable tie, 2 plant stakes, anchor, 3 ring seals)
• Scrap plastics: 64 ( 16 > 1" , 48 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 1 (tile scrap)

A couple of the wash-ins were kind of cool. An ancient phone clip from an old PhoneMate answering machine system:

And a very worn & aged scrap from a "Nifty Magnetic SpaceSaver Binder":

Neither of these makes sense as ocean debris. Yet both were in the ocean. Probably from either an accidental trash-bag rip near a gutter, or debris from a violent coastal storm years ago.

But of course, the story this week, as many weeks running, is the lobster trap debris:

979 pieces of vinyl. A record.

That's barely enough to recreate one lost lobster trap. In the hour & a half that I was picking these pieces up at least 6 more lobster traps were lost in the waters of the Gulf of Maine.

That's not sustainable.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 8991
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1812
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5424

Curtis Cove Report - June 13, 2013

Thursday, June 13. 9:30 AM. Mid-60s and on its way up. Light breeze, 1/2 hour before low tide, bright sun... Bring on summer!

And still all to myself

Long lines of clouds in the sky, reverberating energy up and down just like a plucked guitar string -- or a pebble thrown in the ocean.

"Gravity Waves"

It had been a mostly low-energy couple of weeks since my last visit, with a healed summer slope to the beach as a whole. The backshore, so ravaged in February, was back & in blossom.

The low foreshore, heavily saturated by a week of heavy & steady rains, swirled with standing pools and life.

Walking along the backshore, my feet sank into fresh sand that had been blown or washed on top of the last remnants of winter's wrack. Bits of rope stuck out of the mid-foreshore, signs that their overburden had been stripped off (and then tossed onto the backshore). What would that mean for any washed-in plastic? Well, you tell me.

184 pcs of rope, about 140 ft total

158 pcs of nonrope debris

342 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 2 (fiberglass fragments)
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 184
• Fishing misc.: 81 (61 vinyl trap scraps, 8 bait bags/scraps, 2 bumpers, 2 trap parts, 3 balls of fishing line, 4 claw bands, trap tag)
• Food-related plastics: 19 (bottlecap seal, bottle, 14 cup scraps, bread wrapper tag, tiny plate scrap, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 3 (2 aluminum can scraps, seaglass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 29 (6 bag scraps, 3 mylar balloon scraps, Clorox bottlecap scrap, nonfood bottlecap, hair band, 2 very old/broken toy scraps, 7 cords, 2 rubber belts/straps, 2 woven straps, plant ID stake, 3 cable ties)
• Scrap plastics: 18 ( 10 > 1" , 8 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 1 (paper backing/lining)
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 5 (3 fabric scraps, 1"Lobster Cove" scrap, shoelace)

More of the usual. And maybe a little unusual:

The steel inside this large lobster trap scrap has all rusted away. All that's left is the permanent, nondegradable vinyl coating. How long would it take to do that, do you think?

And of course, more subtle evidence of commercial fishing's effects on the Gulf of Maine:

Bleach bottles and bleach bottlecaps are common finds. After sanitizing decks & work surfaces on a rocking boat, bleach bottles are often accidentally (or not accidentally) dumped overboard. They don't go away.

Neither do the plastic remnants of early mornings out to sea.

I have found dozens -- or hundreds -- of scraps of coffeecups and cup lids washed up on my one shore. (Many or most with sea-creature bite & poke marks on them.) More than could be accounted for by seaside strollers. Coffee is an excellent 5AM wake-up for a long day at sea. But pitching a coffee cup overboard when the coffee's gone is bad form.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 4159
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1627
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 1701

Curtis Cove Report - Feb 26, 2013

February 26, 2013. 2:00PM, a couple hours before low tide. My last cleanup of Year 1 at Curtis Cove! Bright sun, 40 degrees. Rough sea, but little wind.

The big breakers out on the outcrops at the head of the cove = soggy & sloppy sand & mud & wrack smeared up and down the shore. A real mess of a beach!

But the first hopeful signs of spring behind the backshore. As I had a big group of witnesses to my efforts this day:

The scooped-out sand and wave-dragged wrack from the backshore spoke of the power of the past week's seas.

And of course stormy days bring lots of plastic "gifts." Including ones that have no business on a beach. A soda/water bottle I could understand. But a honey-bear jug??

Even better, this week brought the remains of a plasticized menu from a Kennebunkport restaurant. From 2007!

We place restaurants right next to Maine's windy coast, and populate them with plastic plates, cups, bottles, ketchup packets, sauce tubs, salt & pepper shakers, forks & knives -- and now even menus. And we wonder why our ocean looks like it does.

So, surprising no one, a very busy day.

236 pcs of rope, about 550 ft total

110 pcs of nonrope debris

346 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 236 (about 550 feet)
• Fishing misc.: 34 (19 bait bags, 3 vents, 2 trap tags, 8 vinyl coating scraps, bumper, clawband)
• Food-related plastics: 23 (3 bottlecap seals, 16 cup scraps, drink wrapper, ketchup pack, honeybear jug, 2007 menu!)
• Food-related glass/metal: 5 (2 whole/new cans, 3 can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 31 (11 bag scraps, 2 mylar balloon scraps, 2 latex balloons, 3 balloon strings, thread spool, tampon applicator, toy shovel handle, pressure-treatment tag from 1988, 5 cable ties, EXIT (?) sign scrap, 2 end caps, plunger scrap)
• Scrap plastics: 13 ( 9 > 1" , 4 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 4 (2 gloves, 2 fabric pieces)

Yet again, fishing debris far & away took the gold this week. Stormy weather & choppy seas tends to fling floatable plastics up and over the outcrops at the cove's head, which is what happened here with the vents, bait bags, and trap tags.

The waves also brought weirdness. The honeybear, the 2007 menu. And this 25-year-old tag from a piece of pressure-treated lumber. Looking brand new!

Tampon applicators were a scourage for me at Bay View beach in Saco. Not many here at Curtis Cove, thankfully. But the cove isn't immune:

And, as always, the poignant bits of seabottom plastics with fish/crustacean bites & pokemarks all through them:

A heck of a thing we do to our world.

Year One Total counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 13854
• Pcs fishing rope -- 4011 (~6600 feet)
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 5245

410

410. That's the number of little bits of vinyl coating from lobster traps I found on February 19. All picked from a thin unfrozen line at the back of the foreshore at Curtis Cove, Biddeford, Maine:

That makes 5237 pieces from the cove in the past year.

We consumers demand "cheap" food, "cheap" everything. In the 1970s, plastic-coated lobstering gear became readily available. Seeming cheap & effficient, Maine lobstermen had no choice. They had to start using it. Those who didn't, soon became ex-lobstermen, pushed out of a competitive business by downward pressures.

See more about the issue of plastic fishing gear in the Gulf of Maine at my Portland Press Herald blog "Undercurrents." A brand-new article on this topic posted today!

Curtis Cove Report - Dec 24, 2012

Monday, December 24, 1PM. Bright sun, mid-30s, strong land breeze, about an hour before low tide.

Yikes

A very different world from December 15. The past week had seen a lot of rain, and one day was kind of blustery. But still didn't expect this mass of wrack. The whole foreshore was a brown goopy mess. In places 2 1/2 ft thick!

Feels like squishy quicksand underfoot

Lower on the foreshore, all of the once-exposed pebbles & cobbles lay buried under thick, soft, yellow-ish sand/mud.

Buried

It takes a lot of energy to turn a beach from cobbles/pebbles to smooth soft sand overnight.

All of this washed-in seaweed means one thing to a Flotsam Diarist:

debris...

debris...

and more debris

Everywhere I turned and stepped. So much debris that there was no real hope of collecting it all. In the end, I had to treat the seaweed as I do sand -- collect the debris lying on top and visible, don't bother digging. Most every kick would have brought more for my garbage bags.

In the end, after much mucking through the goop, this was my haul:

190 pcs of rope, about 350 ft total

177 pcs of nonrope debris

367 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 190 (~350 ft)
• Fishing misc.: 60 (3 bait cleats, 15 vents, 3 parts, 6 bait bags, 4 bumpers, 2 vinyl scraps, 15 trap tags (2 from the 90s), 2 shotgun shells, 3 shell wadding, 6 clawbands, buoy scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 36 (5 bottles - old, 1 bottle base, 3 cutlery, 5 bottlecaps, 3 cap o-rings, 1 cap seal, 3 cup tops, 10 cup scraps, 4 food wrappers, fruit cup - uneaten)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (2 can scraps)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 42 (7 bag scraps, 2 mylar balloons, 3 latex balloons, 4 string, 4 nonfood bottlecaps, golf ball, cigarette tip, lid, tupperware container, diaper, lip balm, toy house mold, Javex bottle bottom scrap, 4 sewage disks, record scrap, 4 caps/plugs, tent peg, 2 vinyl upholstery scraps, hospital ID tag, large crate scrap)
• Scrap plastics: 29 ( 15 > 1" , 14 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 8 (7 fabric scraps, glove)

This was a true cornucopia of debris. Everything from Canadian bleach bottle scraps to part of an old vinyl record. You can find close-ups of some of the stranger debris at my new "Undercurrents" blog for the Portland Press Herald.

A couple that I didn't post there:

Et pourquoi pas?

Two 3/4" caps to some kind of bottle -- probably from Canada given the French/English -- washed up. One was just the cap, the other appears as though the whole top of the bottle was sliced off. Anyone ever see these?

Sproingy

Canada, so wild that even its lobster claw bands roam 150 miles from home!

Anyway, thus ended my Flotsam Diaries collections for 2012. Most definitely with a bang, not a whimper. Happy New Year!

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 11836
• Pcs fishing rope -- 3081
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4693

A Sea of Possibilities

As some of you may know, I've just become the newest writer for the Portland Press Herald online!

My column, "Undercurrents," runs in the Press Herald's Environment-Outdoors blog section. It's very exciting to be part of the team. It'll be nice both for me to reach a new audience, and hopefully to be able to bring some Flotsam Diaries fans to have a closer look at Maine's issues & stories -- and its impressive writers.

For me, it's also exciting -- and poignant -- to know that the sea will always provide plenty of grist for the Undercurrents mill. Here's just a bit of what washed into quiet, deserted, "protected" Curtis Cove, Biddeford, Maine on December 24:

Hope to see you at Undercurrents, and hope to continue seeing you here as well!

Bookends

Two pieces of environmental news moved me the most this past year. Serendipitously, one occurred as the year began, the other as it ended.

In January, I came across an astonishing photo in a travelogue blog of Kuta Beach, Bali:

Source: http://www.changesinlongitude.com/
kuta-beach-bali-trash/

Bali, paradise on Earth, has no infrastructure for dealing with its resorts' tonnage of plastic waste. That waste just gets pitched into the sea, as has been traditional on Bali for centuries. Unfortunately, now it comes back. Worse, it's accepted. The sunbather in this picture -- for her, the fight already seems lost. Her world is one of waste & filth, and she nestles down amid it, to enjoy what she can of her surroundings.

The second "bookend" to my year came just a few days ago. A story I stumbled upon about an extremely rare gingko-toothed beaked whale that washed up in the Philippines.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/D-Bone-
Collector-Museum-Inc/216407245052538

This whale is so rare that in the past 55 years precisely two have been spotted in the Philippines. Including this one. It died from a ~6-foot piece of plastic fishing rope lodged in its digestive tract. (Series of photos here; some of the necropsy. Fascinating but graphic, use discretion.) Basically, it starved.

It's all the same problem: connecting our actions on one day & place with outcomes that may be far away & a long time coming. Deluging developing nations with plastic products... A global fishing industry that loses countless tons of plastic gear daily... These actions have consequences, costs. And we're not paying them.

We're still just running up the environmental credit card. It will come due.

---

The Flotsam Diaries is often a study in manmade ugliness. And it's true, humans, alone in the world, have the capacity to utterly wreck our planet.

But, as far as we know, we are also the only ones who can appreciate that planet. No other creature sits on a lawn and admires the pinks and violets of an incredible sunset, for its own sake. No other species will visit a vacant seashore, sands sun-sparkled and smooth -- freshly washed by an outgoing tide -- and see it not in terms of threats or opportunities of the moment, but in awe. Only we can ponder footsteps of the past, and of the future, and truly know something of our place in this tiny moment of time & space that we each call ours.

So in spite of the ugliness, the Flotsam Diaries continues joyfully into 2013. Because the world is still a beautiful place, worth fighting for. And folks the world over know it.

Peace, and humble appreciation for all of your support and passion and kind words over the years.