Pescadero Memories

(Photo: gooseneck barnacles, courtesy John Vonderlin.)

Hi June,
There was one unusual “I See Dead Things” cluster at Invisible Beach that only appeared once, but has left me hoping for its return. Though, instead of being a cluster of a number of the same things, it was a cluster of different things I had never or rarely seen before. Some of the things I have never been able to discover what they were, others I now know what they are and have seen minor clusters of them at Invisible Beach since then. Why they all showed up that day is still a mystery I’d like to solve.
The photo above shows a group of Gooseneck Barnacles. Thank you Wikipedia for the following:
“In the days before it was realised that birds migrate, it was thought that Barnacle Geese, Branta leucopsis, developed from this crustacean, since they were never seen to nest in temperate Europe, hence the scientific and English names. The confusion was prompted by the similarities in colour and shape. Because they were often found on driftwood, it was assumed that the barnacles were attached to branches before they fell in the water. The Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis claimed to have seen goose barnacles in the process of turning into barnacle geese in the twelfth century.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi June,

As I began regularly collecting the marine debris that was spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium, onto Invisible Beach, I couldn’t help but note that often there would be clusters of certain types of debris. Knowing that moving water frequently does that because of the interactions of the water flow and the object’s density, surface area, and shape, I wasn’t too amazed at first.

After all, the clustering of objects on beaches is perfectly normal.

The typical clustering effect that’s visible on the average beach is characterized by the size of the sediment composing different parts of the beach; fine sand here, a gravel bank of similar-sized pebbles there, or a bed of larger cobbles over there; making you aware of its noisy presence every time a sizeable wave recedes.

Another less common, and slightly more mysterious clustering effect of beach sediment, that you can see occasionally where the waves reach a cliff, a bluff or a dune, manifests itself as black chevrons pointing seaward. These chevrons are usually composed of fine, but heavy particles of magnetite, moved into their characteristic shape by the myriad of forces working in the swash zone. They are called heavy mineral laminae and have been researched quite extensively.

Invisible Beach displays all of those rock related clusters as well as the gravel bed at Neptune’s Vomitorium that contains all the varieties of quartz I have mentioned previously.. But, it also frequently displays clusters of expired critters whose pictures I put into a folder I call, “I See Dead Things.”

The most common dead-things-cluster at Invisible Beach is one most beach walkers are probably familiar with, a great number of mollusk shells of the same type dog-piling together as pictured in the photo at the top of this story.

It also occasionally displays the more tragically poignant clusters of freshly dead sea stars, seemingly saying good-bye to each other as pictured below.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Image: John Vonderlin’s collection of debris found at ‘Invisible Beach.’)

It was not long after the mystery of the tags was solved, while on another pebble and driftwood gathering trip–that we encountered a new mystery to consider.

There were a sizable number of marine debris objects spread along the beach from the colored pebble gravel bank south for about fifty yards and higher up the beach mixed with a thin layer of wrack. There were a number of black strips and rings of what seemed to be parts of inner tubes.

There were numerous balls of fishing line of many sizes interlaced with small twigs. There were golf balls and their remnants, tie wraps, aluminum can remnants, the top portions of plastic bottles, plastic caps, a handful of shoe soles, particularly kayak footwear, a few heels, halves of naked tennis balls, fishing lures, fishing line spools, socks and rags overgrown with seaweed, Frisbee aero rings, sunglasses, lighters, strips of tire treads, bits of colored plastic from both recognizable and unrecognizable sources, and a number of miscellaneous bits of litter.

To see such a concentrated collection of litter on the normally clean beaches of San Mateo, was both disturbing and fascinating. For it to be composed primarily of objects I had rarely if ever seen before on the local beaches was a real head-scratcher.

With these new mysteries presenting themselves, how could I do anything but begin collecting this cornucopia of weirdness? So I did.

Why this all showed up here, seemingly at once, and where it had come from turned out to be more difficult and more interesting mysteries to solve then that posed by “The Contender.” tags.

The last three photos are of most of the debris recovered in one trip and represents a typical “good” haul. End Part 1 Enjoy. John Vonderlin

By John Vonderlin

So, while I now knew where the tags had come from, I didn’t understand why they continued to show up over such a long time.

Had they been floating around out there all this time, with a few occasionally being washed ashore at this beach? That seemed unlikely. It was only when we noticed that at the far northern stretch of the beach, just above the gravel bank that had the colorful pebbles in it, that there was a sizable pile of wrack mixed with gravel and sand, that things started to come clear.

Wrack is seaweed pulled loose from its mooring and piled high on the beach by storms or the high tide wave action. In the top layer of the wrack we found a few partially concealed tags, as well as other litter. Digging around we found a few more.

A light bulb went off,

It seemed fairly obvious that the tags had floated in, become buried in the wrack and gravel pile, then as high tide wave action had eaten at the pile over the weeks, the tags that had been buried were being intermittently released, to eventually move further south, where we had been finding them. We considered the mystery solved.

I’ve attached photos of my collection of tags, mainly gathered from Invisible Beach. Some however were subsequently found as far south as Bradley Beach, at the Santa Cruz/San Mateo County line. The next picture is of the last one found nearly two years later, far to the north at Tunitas Beach.

…more…

Intrigued, I did an Internet search and discovered the sad truth behind their presence on the beach. Here’s the short story of the ill-fated boat, “The Contender.”

From: District 11 Public Affairs Press Release

“Coast Guard Station Golden Gate with the help of Good Samaritan vessels rescued 28 people today after their vessel sank five miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“At approximately 2:30 p.m. today, the Contender, a 49-foot chartered fishing vessel, home ported in Emeryville, Calif., placed an emergency radio call to Coast Guard Group San Francisco to report they were taking on water off of Ocean Beach. A passenger onboard the vessel also placed a 911 call from his cell phone to the Coast Guard to report they were sinking.

“At 2:45 p.m., two 47-foot motor lifeboat crews from Station Golden Gate arrived on scene to find 28 people in the water wearing life jackets. With the response and assistance of several Good Samaritan vessels, all 28 people were rescued from the surf and transported to Station Golden Gate.

“The 24 rescued passengers and four crewmembers from the Contender received medical treatment for hypothermia at Station Golden Gate. One individual did not survive.”

….more….

The next time I returned with a beachcombing friend it was a different story. While we didn’t find another sealed packet of the cards, we did find singletons here and there. We started making a game of it, calling out the numbers of the cards as we picked them up.

Every new number became a source of glee. Each repeated number’s excitement was modulated by its common-ness. Having scoured clean the beach and the vegetation above the swash zone, we figured our game was over, but kept our treasures as momentoes.

How wrong we were.

For some mysterious reason, the tags continued to show up at the beach in the following weeks. While the quantity encountered and the occurrence of new numbers decreased significantly, almost every trip produced a few.

…more….

By John Vonderlin

Having been a Natural Wonder collector, photographer and admirer for years, it seemed logical to create dissonant art by combining objects from my collection with some of the disturbing and odd things I was finding. But that came later. Here’s what I consider the start.

My love affair with the non-buoyant debris of Invisible Beach, actually had its roots in the day I encountered some unusual flotsam there.

Flotsam is floating debris from a shipwreck, the more common sibling of jetsam, which is material thrown overboard to lighten the load of a boat in distress.

Viewing the flotsam, a plastic wrapped bundle of fish tags from a boat named, “The Contender,” as nothing more then odd beach litter, I picked it up and put it in my litter bag.

As I proceeded northward towards the pebbles and driftwood I was seeking, I found many more of the loose, business-card-sized, plastic-like fish tags with a variety of different numbers on them. I remember entertaining momentarily the idea of trying to contact the boat’s owner and complain about their carelessness. Instead I threw them all in a trash can before I drove away.

….more

By John Vonderlin

While the pretty pebbles and unusual driftwood chucked up on the shore at Invisible Beach, by Neptune’s Vomitorium, hinted at an interesting story, it was the manmade non-buoyant marine debris that was regurgitated there that came to obsess me.

Over the last three years I’ve spent thousands of dollars and maybe a thousand hours gathering it, washing it, untangling it, photographing it, sorting it, then eventually arranging some of it in a myriad of ways into hundreds of pieces of generally whimsical art.

I ended up with what I believe is the most bizarre and largest collection of non-buoyant marine debris in the world. Hey! No snickering, please.

Nearly every trip to Invisible Beach not only added to my growing collection, but offered some new mystery that required pondering or researching. Through observation and my collecting, various rhythms, patterns, clusters and cycles of deposition revealed themselves, usually hazily, unfortunately.

I formed theories, made guesses, tested hypotheses, discarding some of them, as I gathered ever more information as well as debris. It was as if this odd spot was allowing me to Moses-like, part the sea that was hiding the out-of-sight-out-of-mind ugliness of our careless usage of the ocean as a trashcan.

…more…

(Photo by John Vonderlin)

To reach more of John and to catch up with his definitions and the names he has given the South Coast beaches, click here

Story by John Vonderlin ——-many of John’s terms are described here

Flotsam in the nearshore takes that path in our area because it is driven by the longshore current (littoral drift)–which in turn is driven by the prevailing northwest winds. I believed once they floated in, they were trapped and were subsequently rounded off by rubbing against the rough grit of the sand, just as in a rock tumbler.

I believed this effect, which should exist in almost any promontory-bounded cove, was strengthened by the topographical features of the shallow, flat reef that extended almost continuously along the length of the beach out to about fifty yards.

The reef’s rocks were composed of numerous sedimentary layers turned on edge with the differential erosion of the layers of varying hardness causing a series of parallel grooves and ridges. The ridges and grooves because of their southwest to northwest orientation would tend to guide any flotsam retreating from the beach directly into the prevailing northwestly winds, sending them backwards toward the beach.

I began to photograph easy- to- identify pieces of driftwood and noted they did indeed hang around for months. I also noted that occasionally in high surf conditions small quantities of driftwood were escaping past the southern promontory, to be temporarily spread thinly over the beaches to the south; then disappear.

I began to call the small embayment where they were usually concentrated Roach Motel Embayment, after the commercial about the baited box in the commercial that brags, “They check in, but they don’t check out.”

Still, so many of the pieces I was finding were different from the normal driftwood I was used to finding, I knew I wasn’t seeing the full picture. Plus I was perplexed that in all my trips there, I’d never actually seen any pieces float in. One day while collecting some more pebbles I learned…”The Rest of the Story.”
I hadn’t ever seen them floating in because they weren’t. The pieces weren’t floating in because at some point in the oceanic phase of their existence they had become waterlogged and sunk.

As they bumped along the nearshore bottom on their southward trip, from who knows where, they were being ejected onto the beach by a feature I came to call Neptune’s Vomitorium. This feature apparently also provided the path for the ejection of the pebbles and other objects onto the beach.

In a short aside, if you websearch “sinkers lumber,” you’ll find there is a number of thriving businesses that specialize in producing lumber from recovered waterlogged trees, many harvested from virgin forests hundreds of years ago before they sank to the bottom of lakes or rivers.

I further believe that after being ejected on the beach at Neptune’s Vomitorium, they would be moved southward by the waves a short distance down the beach to the Roach Motel Embayment.

At that point the factors I mentioned earlier came into play, more or less restricting them to this stretch of the beach.This also provided the explanation of why these piles of driftwood contained so many unusual shapes and types. Just as with rocks, where the harder a rock is, the better it tends to take a polish, the harder and denser pieces of wood; that is, knot holes, the underside support of branches, forks, heartwood, etc. were durable enough to last long enough to be rounded into attractive shapes. They weren’t doing it on the beach to any degree though. They were doing it during their silent procession along the ocean’s bottom in the nearshore.

With more research I discovered, Neptune’s Vomitorium, was at the site of a paleocreek. During the Ice Age, the ocean level was hundreds of feet lower because of all the water locked in glaciers. Consequently, the coast at that time was far offshore from its present position.

I’ve read that ten thousand years ago that was almost out to the Farallones. The creeks that ran off our local hills and mountains eroded canyons and valleys that have since been submerged by the rising waters that resulted from the melting of the glaciers. The ones that haven’t filled entirely with sediment are called paleocreeks.

For some reason, at Neptune’s Vomitorium, there is an interaction between the longshore current, the paleocreek, and other subsurface topography to episodically, but regularly, regurgitate large amounts of non-buoyant objects onto the beach like no other place I know.

Those objects include the pebbles from the offshore quartz ridge, waterlogged wood, and enormous quantities of non-buoyant marine debris from the fishing and crabbing industry, your lost beach items, and whatever lost or discarded trash that bounces along the bottom of the streams that drain the local watersheds.

In the last three years I’ve collected about ten trash cans full of these little treasure.

I sort them by size and shape for various planned artistic endeavors. Initially, I would drill them and string them by the hundred into what I called “Ocean Garlands,” a beachcombing version of the strings of popcorn we make for decorating our Christmas trees.

Lately, I’ve been using some of the more unusual ones I find in some of my thematic art exhibits. Check out the oval-shaped piece of wood.

Do you recognize what it once was?***

I’ve combined this mysterious piece of driftwood with a golf ball core, the regurgitated remnant left after a poor shot’s long and degrading journey of nearly twenty miles to Invisible Beach, from one of the Ritz Carlton’s, world class golf courses, and a Hole-in-the-Heart Valentine Rockomorph. It is part of the several hundred pieces of art I have assembled for my “The Silent Procession from The Sunken Cathedral to Neptune’s Vomitorium.”

At this time, I want to move on to my next claim: Invisible Beach is the best marine-debris-collection spot on this coast. Enjoy. John Vonderlin

*****For the answer to what the driftwood was….see below

Hi June,
Neither I, or my beachcombing friend who found it, figured out what it was. However, several people recognized it when I showed it to them. It’s the head of a push-broom. The two slanted holes allow you to change the angle of the handle, keeping the bristles from getting too slanted in one direction, limiting it’s effectiveness. Enjoy. John Vonderlin.