Another walk on the beach

In between squalls, the sun came out today, so I headed out for another beach walk. I spent the first mile and a half looking for interesting things, and the next mile and a half picking up storm debris. I hauled 2 bags full and several arms full of plastic and rope off the beach. As I was gathering debris, I had the great fortune of finding another glass float. This one is a rolling-pin float, 6 inches long. It was rather dirty, and looked rather drab amongst the other debris along the drift line.

I brought the float home, and scrubbed it off, picked up the camera, and returned to the beach to photograph more debris. The bottom photo is the cleaned-up rolling-pin float near some kelp.

Early in the 20th century, glass floats were extensively used by Japanese fishermen to hold up their fishing nets. After World War II, the floats may have been manufactured from melted down Coke or sake bottles, which explains their color. After plastics became widely available, fishermen replaced their glass floats with plastic floats.

Along the drift line, where the high tide had deposited debris, today I noticed lots of tiny pieces of plastic that looked like confetti (and included a pink plastic dog, middle photo). Plastic doesn't decompose, but gets brittle and breaks into smaller pieces. Marine animals mistake the tiny pieces of plastic for prey, and ingest them.

The top photo is some of the beach debris, just as I found it.

Beachcombing after the storms

The Oregon coast has been blasted by storm after storm for the last few weeks. We have experienced sideways rain, sleet, hail, and thunderstorms that delivered violent, unsettled weather, with only occasional sun breaks. Today our weather calmed a bit, and a light west wind blew. I took advantage of the weather window to walk on our Pacific beach. Soon after I began walking near the water's edge, I started seeing all kinds of flotsam that had washed ashore.

A very large pile of flotsam, named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floats in the central north Pacific Ocean, trapped in a gyre (a giant eddy) by current and wind. The patch has been estimated to extend over an area the size of Texas (or even larger), and is thought to consist of 80% plastics, weighing 3.5 million tons. Although the patch is growing, west winds occasionally deliver some of the trash to the beaches along the Oregon coast.

On my walk today, I encountered a huge variety of plastic and glass bottles, plastic and styrofoam fishing floats of at least 15 different shapes and sizes, one tractor seat, one hard hat, a couple of shoe soles, plastic baskets, and other debris.

I have lived here on the Oregon coast since 1982. Back in 1982, on another day with a west wind, I plucked a large glass float out of the water, just off the beach. Since that day, although I have spent hundreds of hours walking on the beach, and looking for floats, I haven't found another glass float, until today, when I found two. They are 2 1/2 and 3 inches in diameter.

I was really looking for sandpipers, but I'll settle for glass floats!