Collection Report March 31, 2011

Back to Bay View!

1:45PM, 45 deg, gathering clouds

With the snow gone, the scene isn't changing much from week to week. Except for this.

A rare straight shot

Can't remember seeing a straighter tide line. Or a lower one. This weakling barely made it up the slope, stopping just below the curious ridges/cusps Bay View is known for. Significant that a weak tide meets the starting edge of the cusps? Another question for the books.

As the picture shows, a bit of energy reached the shore this week. A line of grotty, rotted organics, with a batch of grotty, rotted litter tangled up among them. Here's Zone N:

50 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 22 (5 claw bands, 3 trap coatings, 12 rope fragments -- all badly frayed and worn, bait bag, monofilament twisted around rusted wire)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (chewing gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (bladder/hot water bottle scrap?, rubber band, plastic bag scrap, cord, hard blue scrap like the edge of a recycling tub, 3 small hard scraps)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 10
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 3 (pair of Abercrombie & Fitch flipflops, bit of rope)

A close-up of the fishing gear:

Not recent

I've seen plenty of old rope wash in. But nothing quite this worn out. Some bits had turned shaggy, more like dreadlocks than rope. Probably a good story in there, if only I could decipher it.

On to Zone S:

23 finds:

• Building materials: 6 (3 asphalt chunks, 2 brick, 1 tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 6 (claw band, 4 rope bits, bait bag scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (freshly dropped spoon)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (scrap)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 6 (bottle stopper/lid, kite, tieback, 3 scraps)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

More shaggy rope, just like Zone N. (Though, as usual, less stuff than in Zone N.)

I won't pretend that 73 finds is news-worthy. Even the kite & flip-flops don't do much to make this week particularly interesting. But it is odd that so little floatable material is coming in, week after week after week. And curious that what washed in this time was so grotty and old. It just feels like, for whatever reason, since the Christmas storm nothing has floated into Saco Bay. What does that mean? Wish I knew. As always, a trip to Bay View brings more questions than answers.

But this time, it did bring closure to a lingering, doomed relic.

Bay View Convent. 1872 - 2011

The more things stay the same, the more they change.