Super Sand

I turned out one of my pockets earlier and dumped half a handful of sand all over the floor.  This isn't an uncommon scenario - not only does sand get in my pockets, but it seems to end up in my wallet, fill my socks (when I wear them), and sometimes rains down from my hair when I shake my head.  Ordinarily it's a massive inconvenience, but today I realised just how good sand is and how important it is to me.  I'd miss it if I didn't spend each summer with my bed full of the stuff.    

Sand is different all over the world, and if you look at a load of it through a microscope each grain varies enormously from the next.  It's just ground up bits of rock and minerals, with the most common constituent in temperate latitudes being silica in the form of quartz crystals (which look incredible through a microscope), whilst in the tropics calcium carbonate from ground up coral reefs and shellfish make the beaches tour-brochure white.  Black sand is normally found on coastlines where there is a lot of volcanic basalt rock.

 Sand moves around a lot, and not just by hitching a ride in my pockets.  In the littoral zone waves push it up the beach and pull it back down, shifting untold amounts of it along shorelines each year.  This movement of sand forms the lumps, bumps, and eventually the sand banks that cause waves to break on the beach, so you can see all of a sudden where my appreciation for the stuff comes from.  There is nothing quite so good as some well organised grains of sand.  Whilst on a University field trip five other students and I had to try to hold a sand trap in a French shorebreak to assist with research into the movement of sediment.  We had to keep repeating the measurements, however, because each successive wave knocked at least four of us off our feet and washed us and all of the apparatus up the beach on our backs.  Sand also carries well on the wind, as can be seen in the Pyrenees where the south facing sides of some of the mountains are tinged yellow with sand that has been blown north from the Sahara, and it's even been said that Saharan sand has, on occasions, fallen from the skies over South America having been carried by the trade winds across the Atlantic.

Sand is pretty special stuff.  We once used it to measure our most precious resource - time.  

It covers massive areas of our planet both above and below the water and has a big role in shaping how we have fun, whether with a bucket and spade building sandcastles on the beach as grommets or by facilitating how the waves that we surf as adults break.  For that, I can deal with having to tidy up the piles of it that fall from my body and clothing at regular intervals.

Smells Like September

I stepped out of my car into the sunshine at Sennen this morning and it smelt like September.  I mean, I had a real definite waft of the smell of September hit me, and it hit me like some sort of catnip.  I got so excited.  I don't know what that smell was…  the ozoney smell from the breaking waves of the small groundswell?  Cold sand and a warmer ocean?  Warm surf wax?  Coffee?  I couldn't place my finger on it but it was a clear aroma and it made me realise that it was September 1st.  It was an instant reminder of the beaches when schools are back in and work slows down for everyone who works a seasonal job, dawn surfs that aren't still "last night" as they can be in midsummer, bare feet on cold sand, French boardwalks over the sand dunes, Portuguese custard tarts and hurricane swells.  Oh!  September, how I've missed you so.  

Winter's Wave of Waste

The fight goes on:  Plastic does not go away, it simply goes somewhere else.

The Easter long weekend signals the start of the tourist season here in the South West of the UK, and over the next seven months a whole economy will be running off the back of our beaches.  And they're in a right state.  Last weekend there were two consecutive beach cleans on my local beach, Polzeath, and at the end of it all there were still multi-coloured bits of plastic in the sand.
On the Friday the local VMCA (Voluntary Marine Conservation Area) did a litter pick on the beach, and then on Saturday there was another one organised as part of Surfers Against Sewage's Big Spring Beach Clean.  At the end of it all you could still turn over any one of the big piles of rotting seaweed (natural and normal) and at the bottom, where the sea lice have decomposed the seaweed into a stinking mush, you could scoop up a big handful and it would be full of tiny particles of plastic.  They were almost impossible to pick out; all of the volunteers were just picking up the visible pieces of plastic - those big enough to grab with rubber gloves on and, usually, the brightly coloured and highly visible pieces.  All of the tiny pieces of clear plastic remained for another day, and that's the sad fact of the matter; you could spend all day every day picking up all of the tiny pieces of plastic and each high tide would just wash in even more.

   

These little pieces of plastic, often called "nurdles" or "mermaids tears", come from a variety of sources.  Many are the small pellets used in the primary production of injection moulded plastic products such as buckets, bins and things like that.  You know when plastic products have that little circular blob somewhere on the bottom with a kind of stringy bit of plastic hanging off it?  That's a product that's been injection moulded, a process where tiny plastic pellets are heated up and squirted into a mould.  Other tiny plastic particles come from things like face-scrubs and exfoliators.  Yup, those tiny beads that you rub into your face to clean it are actually plastic, and they go down your plughole and end up, eventually, in the sea and on the beaches.  One positive point is that Unilever announced in January that they will remove all plastic microbeads from their products by 2015.  It's a start I guess.

So what's the problem with such tiny pieces of plastic?  Out of sight, out of mind no?  Definitely not.  Plastic acts like a sponge to chemicals and toxins, absorbing them and carrying them around.  Fish, shellfish and seabirds ingest the plastic and it often fails to pass through their digestive systems, so they accumulate plastic and the toxins that they carry.  We eat said fish and shellfish, and the process of bioaccumulation stops with us, the apex predator.  Of 504 fish examined in a recent study undertaken by a team from the University of Plymouth and the UK Marine Biological Association, more than a third were found to contain pieces of plastic less than one millimetre in size.

Sir David Attenborough can say it far more eloquently than I can.

Part of an outdoor art installation on the beach in Rio constructed entirely from discarded plastic bottles.  This was an exhibit for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) from which the EU pledged to be at the forefront of efforts to reduce marine litter.

Beach litter isn't a particularly pleasant subject to photograph.  I've got a whole folder on my hard drive full of images of beaches covered in plastic, bits of fishing net, bottles and dead birds.  It's grim.  This May 21st I'll be giving a presentation on Marine Plastic Pollution for Polzeath VMCA at the Tubestation in Polzeath, and whilst I'm certain that they could have got somebody in who is much more of an authority on the topic than me, I've definitely got enough images to illustrate an hour long talk.  It will be publicised more nearer the time but if you're in the area then you're more than welcome to attend.  I have a feeling that I will be preaching to the converted however I've been keeping a few choice images back and I hope that I'll be able to make it as interesting and engaging as possible.

For past rants about the subject of marine litter and plastic on our beaches (they're becoming an annual feature on here) and for hints and tips on small things that you can try to do to make a difference, please click through to read previous posts "Give Up SUP's" and "Pick Up 3".  

Love/Hate

"Polzeath has to be the only wave in the world where going along it is actually worse than just going straight"

My housemate Benny and I were running down the beach out front of our house towards some distinctly ordinary looking waves when he hit me with this statement.  It's hard to disagree with him, but we still surf our local spot more often than either of us would care to admit, regardless.

Polzeath is a big old expanse of flat sand, fed by sediment flowing out of the mouth of the Camel estuary.  On Spring low tides it's just under half a mile from the top of the beach to the water's edge and the massive tidal range and constant flow of fine sand means that there are never really any discernible sand banks there.  At one point years ago a few of us hatched covert plans to hand out shovels to the young kids in the boardriders club to see if we could get them to dig a rip-bank and make good waves for at least one turn of the tide.  Waves seem to break sideways faster than they travel towards the shore and the wave faces are kind of fat and flat without much of a lip.  This embeds most local surfers with a front-foot heavy stance and an inclination towards running off down the line looking for a section to hit rather than going straight down and back up again.  A visiting Aussie friend of mine claimed that it was a bit like snowboarding, stating that you "just s-turn your way down the face until the thing stands up enough for you to tell whether or not it's a left or a right".
And it's usually busy.  Busy with other surfers, with tourists, swimmers and bodyboarders, legions of surf-schoolers and hordes of longboarders (and, now, more recently stand-up paddlers).  Easy access, a big beach, and nice soft waves.  In past summers the lifeguards used to split the beach in two by anchoring a buoy-line out past the mean low tide line.  When waves rolled through the buoys used to lift the seaweedy green rope up out of the water like a trip wire, either catching people out or forcing a rapid cutback and kick-out from the more-aware.
But we all love our local.  Almost as much as we love to moan about it.  Sure, surfing at home usually makes for a bit of "upwards readjustment" any time you go on a surf trip, but it also makes for good paddlers.  You can't consistently surf the spot with one of the longest paddle outs in Europe and not develop a bit of shoulder stamina.  And almost every other surf spot is a pleasant change when we go up the hill and leave the village.  It makes for happy travellers, even if it's just round the corner to the next beach.

Hating your local surf spot?  You've gotta love it, one way or another.

Image:  Benny - out of season, loving hating on his local, and tearing into it just for good measure.  By Mat Arney.

The Brilliance of British Bellyboarding

Greater than the sum of it's parts:  deckchairs, bunting, an Original Surfboard Co. bellyboard and John Isaac's Model T Ford.  World Bellyboarding Championships 2011.

Some things define British beach culture like nothing else:  buckets and spades, stripey deckchairs, sandcastles and of course bellyboards.  International readers may raise a quizzical eyebrow at this point, however a lot of British based readers will be drifting off into memory-ville.  A lot of us caught our first wave on a bellyboard; not our first "stand-up" wave, but lying down on a piece of plywood with a rounded nose, engulfed by the whitewater from waist-deep until we were deposited in the warm shallows.  In my grandma's shed there was a stack of these old things - my grandma's bellyboard which now rests in the corner of my bedroom, and three that my mum and her sister and brother had painted their favourite sea creatures on when they were children.  Most people who spent their childhood holidays on the beaches of Britain will have one of these bent plywood boards stashed away in a shed or up in the rafters of their garage, but these days they're starting to dust them off and get them back in the sea.  Bellyboarding's back.

Jenni Hosen entering into the spirit of things.  WBBC 2011. 

"Surf riding", as it was called back then, was a British beach pastime inspired by Hawaiian paipos and which has a history in this country dating back over one hundred years to the turn of the 19th Century, when Hawaiian Royalty were sent to Britain to finish their education.  Ever wondered why the Hawaiian State flag has the Union Jack in the corner?  That's the link right there.  After World War Two sheet material such as plywood became increasingly available and shaping a 4 foot long by 1 foot wide board with a rounded nose, often steamed or laminated to a slight upward curve, was easy.  You could get 8 boards out of a standard sheet and make them at home before loading the car to head south and west for the family holiday.  Wade out to waist deep water, wait for a strong line of whitewater to advance towards you then turn around and push yourself into it.  Good, simple, honest fun.

Arthur Traveller used to come down to Chapel Porth in Cornwall on holiday from London every year, bringing with him his plywood bellyboard.  When he passed away back in 2002 the National Trust's car park attendant Chris Ryan and Head Lifeguard Martin Ward organised the first "World Bellyboarding Championships" in his memory on the first Sunday of September.  This year is the championship's tenth year, and promises to be even better, and more eccentric than ever.  Modern wetsuits are not allowed, and classic woolen bathing suits are the most you're really meant to wear in the waves.  Everyone piles in for the expression session before the "serious" heats begin in two categories:  Juniors for anybody under the age of 60, and seniors for the more "practised" attendees who can get there using their bus pass.  For anybody not keen on wading out into the Atlantic Ocean in September can stay on land and get involved in the bake-off.  It's a wonderful event where a sense of humour is just as important as a bellyboard, chock full of British beach culture and traditions with a brilliant dose of classic eccentricity.  Knotted handkerchief and sand in your sandwiches anyone?  I'll see you there on Sunday September 2nd.  Enter here.

 The "Expression Session"

Give Up SUP's (single use plastics)

WARNING: Reading this post about the problems of plastic pollution in our oceans and it's impact on the marine environment and wildlife might make you sick up in your mouth a bit. Also, it's a massive, massive, subject area and I can't do it justice in a single post (I've tried before) so I'll pepper this piece with links so that, should you wish to, you can click away and learn some more, and hopefully be moved to become a force of change.

Look what I found on my local beach during a beach clean last October. No needle but the plastic body of a syringe (held by Neil of BeachCare) on a beach that I run down without looking where I'm stepping and which we walk our dog on most days. Barf.

Spring is starting to show it's sunny self here in the South West of the UK which means that the beaches are getting busier; there are lots of people coming down to the beach, and there is also a load of litter on the sand that's been washed ashore by the winter storms over the past few months. This is a year-round problem on almost every single stretch of coastline on the entire planet and it's a problem that we can't tactfully ignore or shy away from.

The beach that I live on is part of a Marine Conservation Area and is cared for by a group of legendary volunteers. Part of their work is undertaking regular beach cleans alongside the BeachCare programme run by Keep Britain Tidy who organise beach cleans on 17 beaches across Devon and Cornwall. Neil who runs the project just sent out a newsletter detailing the past years work; 790 big bin bags of rubbish were removed from our local beaches over the course of 113 beach clean events utilising 2200 volunteer hours on the beach. Most of these events last for around an hour and they finish with tea and cake so it's well worth it, and if you can't make it along to one then here's an idea...why not take a couple of empty bags with you when you walking along the beach and pick up any plastic and trash that you find (use one as a "glove") or pick up anything that shouldn't be on the beach when you're walking back up the beach after a surf. If everybody picked up just three bits every time they visited the beach then it'd make a massive difference. Check out the inspirational Pick Up 3 campaign started by a 16 year old kid in California fed up with the state of his local beach.

Some friends and I explored the coast of Oman towards the end of Cyclone season and it seemed that all of the litter in the Indian Ocean had been pushed up into this corner and washed up on the mostly deserted coastline.

The two repeat offenders on the list of items picked up from our beaches are plastic pieces (aka nurdles or "mermaids tears") and fishing flotsam and jetsam such as line and nets. 2011 has seen a large increase in fishing related litter which is being investigated and combated by Fishing For Litter. The impacts of fishing nets and monofilament line, alongside plastic packaging straps, are best illustrated by the Gannets of Grassholm Island, just off the coast of Wales. Each year 40,000 nesting pairs arrive on the island to build or repair their nests, and often the nest-building males collect plastic litter from the oceans in preference to seaweed because it floats and is highly visible, then return to Grassholm to weave it into their nests. Juvenile gannet chicks often become entangled in this synthetic material and as they grow become trapped and tethered to their nests. When the colony returns to sea in Autumn the trapped juveniles are left behind and slowly starve unless released by the small team of RSPB volunteers who visit the island each year to cut them free. Grim. On Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, miles from anywhere, seabird corpses decompose revealing just a skeleton and a gut full of plastic crap that they've eaten.

A juvenile gannet that perished after becoming entangled in plastic litter that was woven into it's nest on Grassholm Island. Image courtesy of the RSPB.

But it's not just seabirds. Plastic bags bob around the oceans looking remarkably like jellyfish to the large marine animals that feed on them. Postmortem examinations carried out on dead cetaceans and turtles frequently reveal guts full of plastic bags which do not pass through or decompose and accumulate and starve the animals. I've harped on about it before, but the fate of turtles who eat plastic bags and then float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun particularly grosses me out.

A lot of this crap blows around in the wind as well as being transported by ocean currents. The correlation between onshore winds and beach pollution is plain to see. The wind blew from the west every day in December, and in January BeachCare removed over 200 bags of litter from local beaches. For ocean borne litter, much of it floats around in the currents until eventually winding up in one of the five Oceanic gyres which are points of confluence for major currents in each of the major oceans.

Maximenko's Plastic Pollution Growth Model from 5 Gyres on Vimeo.

So that's all pretty depressing. How do we, little old "us", make a difference? Here's a few ideas of how you can think global, act local and be a small cog in a bigger engine for change:

• Pick Up 3. Or more if you can join a regular beach clean event, details here and here.
• Refuse plastic bags. If you visit the supermarket then take your own bags, buy a bag for life or if you're in the USA use a paper bag and recycle it. If you have your groceries delivered then click the option for delivery without bags so your shopping arrives in crates that the driver takes back to the store.
• Carry A Cup. Keep a cup or small flask in your bag or car to take into coffee shops rather than getting take-out cups. Those plastic lids are particularly evil.
• Drink from the tap. In many countries tap water is totally safe so if possible drink from the tap or refill bottles rather than buying expensive and pointless bottled water. I grew up just a few miles away from a plant that bottled water for a supermarket. Exactly the same water that came out of the tap at my home.
• Try to buy grocery items that aren't overly packaged (loose vegetables immediately spring to mind). If enough people refuse to buy based on excessive packaging then the supermarkets will stop using it. It'd save them money too after all. If you're funny about the possibility of other humans touching your food at some point then wash it or peel it when you get home.

LINKS:

• Surfers Against Sewage (marine litter campaigns)
• BeachCare or e-mail neil(dot)hembrow (at) keepbritaintidy(dot)org to get involved.
• 5 Gyres - check out their amazing JUNK voyage.
• The Plastic Pollution Coalition
• Pick Up 3

Footprints in the Sand

When we find footprints in the sand,

Leading from the Sea,

We imagine an envoy perhaps

Or a traveller from a distant country

Come to tell us long term exiles that we can return.

At night we sit by beach fires,

As driftwood adopt animal shapes:

Fishes, lizards, snakes.

We invite nostalgia with our threading flutes,

The galloping guitar,

Hoarse laments of our favourite singer.

And in daytime fields tending red and purple fruits,

We watch the silver river

As it flows into the Sea

And it occurs to us that the mother country,

The one we have abandoned,

Is the Sea itself.

Those footprints then,

Whose were they?

Richard Gwyn

Pick Up 3

In mid-winter we have all sorts of flotsam and jetsam wash up on the beaches of Cornwall.
Photo by Dave Williams.

Iniative Surf recently ran a training camp on Long Island, New York and the groms got involved with improving their beach environment after a training session.
Getting good habits at an early age.
Photo by Alex Espir.

All this will end up in the Ocean that you can see at the end of the ditch (right into the line-up of a surf spot) next time it rains. This has to change.

An Tor Orth An Mor took a two week holiday this northern summer, a bit last minute and far enough off the map to make posting photos difficult so apologies if you missed us...but we're back now, so on with business.

This one is an important one, both to spread a message well worth spreading and to try and shout it from the roof tops and encourage you the reader to pass the message on, but also to salute the people in this post who lead the charge in one way or another and do their bit.
Litter. You wouldn't believe how much of it ends up in the oceans or washed up on beaches, almost anywhere in the world no matter how remote and off the beaten track you go there's a pretty good chance that you'll find some plastic washed up on your idylic beach, maybe carried there by the winds and currents from thousands of miles away. In some places there are unbelievable levels of rubbish on the beaches and in the water, perhaps because of the prevailing wind direction or because the locals there don't have any refuse collection and wherever they throw it, it washes downstream to the coast. But regardless of the reasons why, it really shouldn't be there at all. But how can you help? Sometimes there's just too much to feel that you can make a difference.

Pick Up 3. It's that simple. The brainchild of 16 year old Cobi Emery from San Diego, California, Pick Up 3 asks you to pick up just three pieces of litter or trash when you walk back up the beach from the surf. You can carry three bits in one hand and dump them in a bin at the top of the beach or put them in a bag in your car to dispose of later, that way slowly but surely, little by little, we can start to make a difference; it's enough to have an impact whilst still being easily manageable.
Not only does the beach look nicer then, but the impact on the marine environment is amazing too - thousands of turtles and dolphins die each year because they mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them, only to either fill their guts with undigestable plastic and starve, or in the case of turtles, float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun. Wrong. So plastic bags, bottles, bits of fishing nets and line...if it didn't grow there it shouldn't go there.

My friend Alex from Initiative Surf asks all of his clients, be they junior competitive surfers or clients on guided surf trips to pick up 3 on their way back from every surf as part of his coaching regime, whilst Tom and the staff and customers of Island Vibe in Jeffreys Bay do regular beach clean ups there, with one big annual effort. This year 80 of them collected litter on the western beaches of J-Bay, filling bags and bags with unwanted refuse. Unfortunately, the next time the wind blows offshore, more plastic will blow out of the township and down the beach, just as after the first rains of the season in Morocco, Indonesia or any other developing coastal nation the water is too filthy to surf or swim in because the floodwater washes out all of the ditches and drains that locals use to dump their refuse in to. But perhaps slowly, 3 pieces at a time we can set an example, educate and begin to clean up the marine environment because we all live downstream of something and the oceans are too important to mess with.

Leave it better than you found it. Please.

Staff and guests at Island Vibe clearing the beach and drains that make up their back yard.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

More people and less litter than the previous year, so it's looking hopeful.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

A good job well done.
Photo by Rene Thornton.

Volounteers from the Polzeath VMCA clearing our local beach, thanks guys!

www.pickup3.org
www.sas.org.uk
www.surfrider.org
www.polzeathmarineconservation.com

She Sells Sea Shells...

Just off the coast of Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, the cold Benguela current from the South Atlantic collides with the warm, tropical Agulhas current which runs runs down the East coast of the African continent. Where they collide offshore, they drop all of the treasure they're carrying and it all washes up on the beach in a big colourful strandline of shells and corals. It's hard not to pick some of it up every now and then when walking to and from working or surfing.