I'm pretty sure the Easter Bunny is around here somewhere.
SURF:
Seems like spring has arrived early. Big NW swells are gone, small SW swells are starting to arrive, and we've got the return of low clouds and mild temps.
Not much surf this past week expect for small SW swell and nice conditions.
Tonight a new small NW swell is filling in along with the leftover SW for chest high surf Friday and shoulder high sets in SD. Those swells back off Saturday morning and as it does, showers will fill in too for bumpy small conditions. As the weak front clears out by Sunday, we'll have breezy conditions from the NW as well as W windswell/groundswell for shoulder high sets. In summary: some fun clean surf tomorrow and bigger bumpier surf on Sunday.
Tides this weekend are:
- 4' at sunrise
- -0.3' at lunch
- 3.5' at sunset
And daylight hours are:
- 6:15 AM sunrise
- 5:45 PM sunset
Water temps are high 50's and if you haven't heard already, Daylight Saving Time is next Sunday! So the sun will be coming up around 7 AM and the sunset will be around 7 PM. Can't wait to surf after work again.
FORECAST:
Have some fun surf lined up for the next 2 weeks (but maybe windy/wet weather along with it). For Monday, the windswell from the weekend backs off and we'll have chest high surf from the W.
Tuesday look small then we get a unique WSW swell from a storm taking shape early next week off our coast. That should give us head high swell late Wednesday into Thursday.
Behind that is a fun chest high+ SW swell around the 10th and more shoulder high WNW swell around the 11th/12th.
And behind those swells, models show a storm forming off Antarctica that may give us a chest high SW again mid-month. Nothing big in the near future but waaaaay funner than what we had this past week. Make sure to keep track of the waves and weather at Twitter/North County Surf.
WEATHER:
As advertised above, we have a weak cold front coming through late Friday into Sunday morning. Basically a weak 1/2" on Saturday. That blows through on Sunday and we'll have nice conditions for the first half of the week. Models show another weak storm mid-week and we could get another 1/2" late Wednesday into Thursday. Behind that, more small cold fronts may move through towards next weekend. Very spring-like the next 10 days.
BEST BET:
Tomorrow with fun NW and clean conditions. Or Monday with leftover NW and clean conditions. Or better WNW the 2nd half of next week but showers? And the same for next weekend? Time your sessions accordingly.
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
A couple times I've reported on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (here & here) and the harm it is to our oceans and environment. Basically there is TONS of trash/plastic in our oceans and it pollutes our waters and our friends of the sea. The Atlantic reported recently that all that trash in our oceans just doesn't sit at the top layer of our oceans- it goes to the bottom too. Like the deepest darkest parts of our oceans. And that's not good for the ecosystem. I'll let The Atlantic explain:
Alan Jamieson remembers seeing it for the first time: a small, black fiber floating in a tube of liquid. It resembled a hair, but when Jamieson examined it under a microscope, he realized that the fiber was clearly synthetic—a piece of plastic. And worryingly, his student Lauren Brooks had pulled it from the gut of a small crustacean living in one of the deepest parts of the ocean.
For the past decade, Jamieson, a marine biologist at Newcastle University, has been sending vehicles to the bottom of marine trenches, which can be as deep as the Himalayas are tall. Once there, these landers have collected amphipods—scavenger relatives of crabs and shrimp that thrive in the abyss. Jamieson originally wanted to know how these animals differ from one distant trench to another. But a few years ago, almost on a whim, he decided to analyze their body for toxic, human-made pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which have been banned for decades but which persist in nature for much longer.
The team found PCBs galore. Some amphipods were carrying levels 50 times higher than those seen in crabs from one of China’s most polluted rivers. When the news broke, Jamieson was inundated with calls from journalists and concerned citizens. And in every discussion, one question kept coming up: What about plastics?
The world produces an estimated 10 tons of plastic a second, and between 5 million and 14 million tons sweep into the oceans every year. Some of that debris washes up on beaches, even on the world’s most isolated islands. About 5 trillion pieces currently float in surface waters, mostly in the form of tiny, easy-to-swallow fragments that have ended up in the gut of albatrosses, sea turtles, plankton, fish, and whales. But those pieces also sink, snowing into the deep sea and upon the amphipods that live there.
Brooks eventually found plastic fibers and fragments in 72 percent of the amphipods that the team collected, from all six trenches that they had surveyed. In the least polluted of these sites, half of the amphipods had swallowed at least one piece of plastic. In the 6.8-mile-deep Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, all of the specimens had plastic in their gut.
Does a single fiber really matter amid all the sediment and detritus that amphipods regularly swallow? Jamieson thinks so. For a start, PCBs and other toxins can stick to plastic, turning fibers into sinks for other contaminants. Also, many of the pieces that his team found were relatively huge. “The worst example I saw was a purple fiber, a few millimeters long, tied in a figure-of-eight in an animal no longer than a centimeter,” Jamieson says. “Imagine if you swallowed a meter of polypropylene rope.”
If trenches from places as distant as Japan, Peru, and New Zealand can be contaminated, it’s likely that humanity’s plastic fingers have stretched into every part of the ocean, including habitats we have barely begun to understand. No marine ecosystem is untouched. “It builds upon a growing body of evidence suggesting that the deep sea, by far the largest habitat on the planet, may very well be the largest reservoir of plastic waste on the planet,” says Anela Choy from the University of California at San Diego.
“It’s not a good result,” Jamieson adds. “I don’t like doing this type of work.”
When he submitted his findings to a scientific journal, the researchers who reviewed the paper reasonably asked how he could tell that the fibers were actually plastic. “Our response was, ‘Some of it’s purple!’ ” Jamieson says. “There’s bits of pink in there. This doesn’t come from animals.” To satisfy the critics, his team chemically analyzed a subset of the fibers and found that all of it was synthetic.
They also took steps to ensure that they hadn’t inadvertently introduced plastic into the trenches. The landers that they used to collect the amphipods have some plastic parts, but they are all bright green and yellow, and no such colors were found in the specimens. Even if the amphipods had eaten plastic from the landers (or from the bait used to attract them), the team only dissected the last of the creatures’ several stomachs to avoid sampling their most recent meals. And they performed those dissections within a special chamber, where continuously rising air stops fibers from their equipment or clothes from settling in the samples. Given these precautions, Jamieson is confident that the fibers he found had sunk into the abyss on their own.
Other scientists have also found plastic litter in the deep; just last year, one team documented a plastic bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Until now, no one had shown that abyssal animals were actually eating those fragments, but in retrospect, it seems obvious that amphipods would. They are exceptional scavengers that excel at finding food. By deliberately pumping water over their body, they can detect the faintest plumes of odor, and with taste buds on their legs, they can forage with every footstep. When a morsel hits the ocean floor, amphipods turn up in droves. “We can catch 10,000 in one day with just a pipe, some bait, and a funnel,” Jamieson says.
Food is scarce in the deep, so amphipods can’t afford to be fussy. They’ll eat pretty much anything, which makes them particularly vulnerable to plastics. And since they sit at the bottom of the trench food webs, their catholic appetite can doom entire ecosystems. “They’re like bags of peanuts,” Jamieson says. “Everything else eats amphipods—shrimp, fish—and they’ll end up consuming plastics, too. And when the fish die, they get consumed by amphipods, and it goes round and round in circles.”
“What you put in the trench stays in the trench,” he adds. Which means that the plastic problem “is only going to get worse. Anything going in there isn’t coming back.”
That’s a hypothesis the team can test in later studies. If Jamieson is right, then amphipods from deeper parts of the same trench should have higher levels of plastics than those from higher up. But Choy says, “We certainly don’t need decades of further scientific study to necessitate more responsible behavior and policies now.”
PIC OF THE WEEK:
- Age of the oceans: 3.8 billion years old.
- Age of this town: 3000 years old.
- Surfers in the line up: 0 (better than the other two numbers above I guess)
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Enjoy the Finer Things In Life
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Watched Rory 'The Dog' Russell Chase Miki 'Da Cat' Dora Up A Tree Once
