Collection Report Jan 9, 2012

Monday, January 9, 2:30PM. Bright sun. Mild offshore breeze, chill in the air. 3 hrs after high-tide.

If you can call it a high-tide. This was the weakest tide I've ever seen at Bay View in 1 1/2 years of wandering it. Unsurprisingly, with no energy, no tides, and offshore winds, little washed up again. Actually, less than little.

Zone N:

12 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (4 brick, 1 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 1
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 4 (baggie - not shown, black tape, 2 scraps >1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Zone S:

6 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (2 asphalt, 3 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (glass bottle scrap)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Take away the asphalt & brick, and there's nothing. On a hunch, I took a walk about 1/5 mile farther south than the southern edge of Zone S. This is an area that I've never collected, but have always anecdotally noted junk lying amid its wrack. This day? Nothing. Not one speck of seaweed or manmade debris. Not even a cigarette butt. Current conditions have pushed & blown everything that was on the sand back into the blue and kept more from washing up.

The perfect culmination of six weeks of truly "bizarre weather," as a NOAA oceanographer I'm in touch with has called it. By the end of the first week in January 2012, over 1000 all-time January heat records had broken. The jet stream, which usually dips deeply into the US from Canada, spent week after week riding high up in Canada. Could I be seeing a small part of the bigger story here on my little stretch of beach?

Anyway. Weirdness. But fun to be seeing it & adding it to the record.