Friday, June 1, 2012

Collection Report May 3, 2012

Thursday, May 3. 2:30PM, low-tide. Upper 40s. Chilly, gray. Finally dry after a couple days of drizzle.
Very high cusps with nicely defined ridges and troughs. Dune grass growing nice & strong, advancing far down the beach compared to 2010 & 2011. A steep shore face, no wrack, no energy, no nothing.

Here, for the record, Zone N:
36 finds:
  • Building materials: 2 (asphalt, tile)
  • Foam/Styrofoam: 4
  • Fishing misc.: 0
  • Food-related plastics: 6 (bottlecap, 1 food wrapper scrap, 2 straw wrappers, straw, chewing gum)
  • Food-related metal/glass: 2 (sea glass, foil wrapper)
  • Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (1 scrap >1", 2 scraps <1")
  • Cigarette filters/plastics: 18 (17 cigs, 1 packaging)
  • Paper/wood: 1 (salt packet)
  • Misc./unique: 0
No obvious wash-ins. Maybe the bits of foam. The sea glass, asphalt, & tile may have bashed around the local sands for months or years. Everything else local or at best blown in. Quickly over to Zone S:
7 finds:
  • Building materials: 3 (asphalt, roof shingle, brick)
  • Foam/Styrofoam: 0
  • Fishing misc.: 1 (shotgun shell)
  • Food-related plastics: 0
  • Food-related metal/glass: 0
  • Nonfood/unknown plastics: 1 (scrap <1")
  • Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
  • Paper/wood: 1 (paper tag from water bottle)
  • Misc./unique: 0
So it continues. Bay View lives in a dream, and for now the people who wander its shores get to see a beach the way their grandparents would have seen it. 5 miles down south at Curtis Cove, here's what I found washed-in during the same week:
Plus the fishing rope:
148 pieces of garbage there in 150 feet of beach in one week. And that was a slow week. Don't let Bay View fool you. The Gulf of Maine is badly abused. And in one place or another, in one time or another, it will show us what we've done to it.

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