Wind, fog and rain

Friday, June 21

Well, here's something that I wasn't expecting for the first day of summer on the beach... it was really cold! In fact, I took a sweatshirt out of my trunk to wear, and I was still surprised by how cold I was. Even the common terns looked chilly as they braced themselves against the gusting wind. What a year of wacky weather it has been.

The tide came up very high last night, so all of the trash I found had obviously already taken a tour out in the ocean. It always makes me very sad to find litter that has been out in the water. A good example of this is with the cigarette butts I found. On a normal day on the north end of Wrightsville Beach, there are very few cigarette butts; in fact, for the last several weeks I have hardly found any at all. Today, however, I found quite a few. They were all waterlogged and at the wrack line, so they had obviously been offered up by the tide, meaning that those chemicals left in the filters have already been released into the water. Like Bonnie Monteleone says, "the solution to pollution is dilution," but you have to wonder, with millions of cigarette butts out in the ocean, how are the chemicals possibly affecting the plant and animal life?

My litter total for today is:
1 piece of a black plastic tarp
43 cigarette butts
7 plastic straws
1 plastic spoon
1 plastic knife
various indistinguishable plastic trash
1 fishing bait
2 balloons
1 champagne cork
5 food/snack wrappers
2 sand toys
1 ice bag
1 clump of styrofoam
7 plastic bottle caps

Overall, it was a very gloomy day. Here's hoping for brighter skies next week!

Peace,
Susan