This morning we awoke and prepared ourselves for our first day of marine debris cleanup. Andy had made a presentation about marine debris to us the day before while we were underway. What he had to say was shocking. Marine debris is an umbrella term for any piece of trash that is thrown or lost overboard from vessels at sea. The majority of this debris is plastic in nature. Since plastic floats and takes a long time to degrade, it poses a hazard to navigation and a threat to the health of sea life for decades. Although it is common practice to dispose of metal, glass, paper, and food scraps at sea, precautions should be made to insure that the material sinks (example: punching holes in bottom of glass jars and metal cans) or it is dumped out so far it has little chance of reaching shore. Plastic, which is illegal to throw over the side in the first place, tends to congregate in two very specific places in the Pacific, called gyres, due to the prevailing currents and wind patterns of the Pacific Ocean (for pictures and related news copy and paste the following link http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/photogalleries/pacific-garbage-patch-pictures/photo2.html).
Occasionally, due to seasonal storms, plastic debris will be blown from these gyres and wind up on beaches that face the direction of these wind and wave patterns. Dead Bird Beach happens to be one of several beaches on Shuyak that have this dubious honor. Dead Bird Beach earned its moniker after oil soaked birds from the Exxon Valdez disaster washed up on it after that horrific spill in the late 1980’s.
We skiffed over to the beach, where we met with several Alaska State Park Rangers who had come over from a nearby park to assist us. We broke into several teams, and split up to cover the entire beach. The beaches in Alaska are vastly different from anything one sees in New York City, Long Island, or the Jersey Shore. The latter are beaches filled with fine to coarse grains of sand derived from quartz, and are part of a network of barrier islands that stretch from Texas to approximately Provincetown, Massachusetts. The former are comprised of boulders and cobbles that have been rounded by incessant wave action as well as abrasion, and are relatively large, in some cases a couple of feet or more across. Dragging fully loaded bags of trash up and down these beaches is no easy feat as the students (and I) will be quick to tell you.
Nonetheless, we patrolled the entire beach, packing out close to a thousand pounds of trash with us when we left after lunch. Once we were back at the Island C the process of loading the marine debris began. The small yellow bags of trash we had collected could go into the hold below decks, while the bulkier items had to be stored on top of the deckhouse or along the fantail near the stern. We had to use a boom crane for the really big stuff, which was a lot more fun then loading stuff in by hand. Finally, we had loaded all of the debris, and we skiffed back over to Shuyak for an afternoon of hiking and exploring the Alaska State Park and Visitor Center. The Visitor Center was a large log home built with timber from the site, and served as an informal headquarters for the staff of rangers and interns living there for the summer season. The property, which looked like it encompassed about an acre of land, also contained several smaller cabins for living quarters, a bathroom and sauna, and a fuel depot. After poking around and surviving several falls on the slippery front porch, we hopped back into the skiffs and headed out with Travis, the ranger on duty, for Hill 508, the highest point on Shuyak Island. 508 stands for the elevation of the hill that was the central focus of the hike.
The hike was remarkable. The trail was very primitive, only a foot across in some spots, and wound itself through a collection of mossy slopes and glens that looked to be out of a movie set of George Lucas. The tree were enormous old conifers, with their lower branches completely encased in wrappings of moss. The moss itself grew everywhere and completely carpeted the ground as far as the eye could see. By the time we had reached the summit, the rain had begun to fall again, so we were only able to grab a quick glance of the Island C swinging at her anchor far below us before the clouds closed in again.
After that, it was back to the beach and off to the Island C to try and warm up and dry off. Not bad for our first day doing beach cleanup.
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