Flotsom and Jetsom

Today dawned warm and cloudy and windy. After being lazy for most of the morning, and helping Hilda wrap a few Christmas presents, I decided to go for a walk.

I walked down to the oceanfront to see how it looked, because the noise of the surf had been real loud all night we knew it must be pretty rough. Sure enough it was rough. The surf was pretty much solid white as far out as the end of the Army pier, and some waves were breaking much further out, probably a quarter of a mile or more.

I walked north toward the Pier, which is about a mile down the beach from our overwalk, and had a brisk wind to my back, I knew walking back would be a lot harder. The tide line was covered with stuff blown up by the rough seas. A few years back, on a sea like this we would find lots of shells, sometimes many whole Whelks, and lots of sea glass. Today I found one tiny, jagged piece of green glass, a smooth flat rock that surely didn't come from around here, and tons and tons of garbage.

Most of the stuff was plastic of every description. Thousands of milk bottle caps and the little plastic band that you tear off when you open the bottle, drinking straws and swizzle sticks and tons of broken small bits of plastic that looked like it had been coarsely shredded. Only a few pieces were more than a couple of inches square, but it covered the tide line for the entire mile down to the pier and who knows how much further. Curiously, there was also a large amount of bird feathers in the wash. Big feathers, like those of a big gull or other sea bird.

I don't know where this garbage came from, (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the single large yellow onion) but I suspect because of the size of the bits of plastic that it was from some ship that had chopped it up before dumping it overboard to get around the law against throwing large pieces of plastic overboard. All in all, a beautiful Outer Banks winter beach was ruined by this disgusting mess.