Scanning the wrack line

Welcome to the second edition of The Briny Newsletter! Glad to have you aboard. Today we're hitting publish on a new episode of The Briny (the podcast), all about a very old Pepsi bottle I found on the beach, and what it might tell us about climate change. So in today's newsletter, a podcast extra: an interview with Brian Marcaurelle, program director of the Maine Island Trail Association, about the enormous amount of garbage that washes up on Maine's islands every year.

But first, the weather.

Courtesy of Environment Canada

Forecast for the Strait of Georgia, north of Nanaimo (of particular interest for anyone following the Race to Alaska):

Today, tonight, and Saturday: Strong wind warning in effect. Wind northwest 15 to 25 knots diminishing to northwest 10 to 15 Saturday morning and to light near noon Saturday. Wind becoming variable 5 to 15 Saturday evening.

Sunday: Wind light increasing to northwest 15 to 20 knots late in the day.

Brian Marcaurelle is the program director of the Maine Island Trail Association, a nonprofit that takes care of over 220 sites along a 375-mile ocean trail that spans the Maine coast. MITA helps maintain day use and camping sites for paddlers and boaters, and publishes an app and guide to the islands. They also coordinate annual cleanups, where volunteers go out to the islands and gather trash, debris, and fishing gear that washes up over the winter.

I spoke to Brian about these cleanup efforts, and in particular about the effects of two major storms that hit Maine in January 2024, causing widespread damage and flooding.

Matt Frassica: Can you tell me about the sort of big spring cleanups that you organize? I've been on one of those and it seemed like a pretty big operation. 

Brian Marcaurelle: They're a lot of fun. The islands are kind of sleepy during the winter, from a human perspective, but there's a lot going on with currents and tides and storms and stuff. And so in the spring, we try to get out there with volunteers and cruise the shoreline and pick up as much of the stuff that's washed up as we can. So we'll do usually four, sometimes five regional cleanups, and we'll get five to eight boats, fill them with people, buzz out to a bunch of islands, clean as much as we can in a day, and bring the stuff back by the end of the day.

Matt Frassica: And in an average year, how much you gather up on those cleanups?

Brian Marcaurelle: Last year, in 2025, we pulled off the equivalent of 2000 bags of trash. Which was a combination of 700 actual trash bags full of trash, and then another 600 bulky items like pieces of dock foam or lumber, big pieces of floats that wash ashore. In addition, we get about a dozen tires a year. And then last year we also removed about 550 lobster traps, most of them mangled beyond salvageability, so we pulled those off with permission from marine patrol.

Typically what we're picking up is plastics and fishing debris. And a lot of the plastic is related to the lobster industry. So it'd be little pieces of trap vents and doors and tags, bait bags, rubber gloves, pieces of rope. It's a different kind of marine debris than you'd find on a beach cleanup. If you went and cleaned Old Orchard Beach, for instance, you'd probably find cigarette butts and candy wrappers and things more that you'd see around a town park. But once you get out on the islands, it's definitely more related to the marine industries.

Matt Frassica: Do you remember any items in particular that stood out as really weird things that have washed up? 

Brian Marcaurelle: I personally picked up a recycling bin out off of Portland Head Light that was floating in the water. We were driving by and we stopped and we saw this blue thing just floating there and it said, "City of Boston Recycles." I've got it in my barn.

Matt Frassica: Zooming in on the spring 2024 cleanup in particular, after those big storms, how much deviation from the norm did you see? Was it substantially more stuff that you were pulling off at that spring cleanup? 

Brian Marcaurelle: I would say the biggest, the most noticeable change was, we were finding bits and pieces of dock and float infrastructure more than normal.

Typically a float will break away and get banged up and wash up on an island, and we might have to deal with one or two a year. But after those storms, there was a lot of lumber in the water that we were pulling out.

It was pieces of pilings, pieces of dock that were kind of connected and you couldn't necessarily tell how it fit into a dock, but you knew it was part of some dock or pier or wharf somewhere.

Matt Frassica: And when you have big bulky stuff like that, how do you physically deal with it? I mean, like, your volunteers are going out with trash bags, basically, and you're in smallish boats. When you have a big piece of a pier or a wharf or a dock that's washed up onshore, how do you take care of that? 

Brian Marcaurelle: It is a challenge. Our boats are 18 feet long. We can put a lot in them, but they don't take a lot of weight necessarily, and that stuff weighs a lot. Our first choice is actually to salvage what we can and use, because some of it is pretty good lumber. It's not useful as a dock or a pier or float anymore, but, it's useful for building erosion steps or bog bridging.

So sometimes we'll cut it up and save what we can and use it on the island for recreational infrastructure. If we can't do that, then we'll cut it up into manageable pieces and get it off and over multiple trips usually in our small boats. 

Matt Frassica: In the couple years since then, what kinds of change have you seen on the islands?

Brian Marcaurelle: I think over time with sea level rise and climate change, there's been a growing awareness that what we may be considered fixed is not going to stay fixed, right? We're starting to identify more vulnerable, lower lying campsites and starting to think, OK, in 50 years, is this going to be a viable place to pitch a tent or do we need to think about migrating the campsite up slope a little bit or to a different spot? So we're starting to kind of look at the trail and the island infrastructure through that lens.

Matt Frassica: Those storms from 2024 were kind of outliers in some ways, but are likely a sign of what's to come. What kinds of things can you do to anticipate or adapt to the reality of more extreme weather?

Brian Marcaurelle: One of the things we did as a result of those storms that we had not done before was, we mobilized a bunch of local paddlers who are year-round paddlers. And because our boats were all tucked away in our boat shop under cover, we weren't really able to get out to the islands until the spring thaw. So these paddlers helped us get some eyes on the islands pretty soon after the storms. And so we were getting some really good intel back that we then shared with the landowners.

So I think if these big winter storms become more frequent, then having volunteers that are willing and able to go out in the winter months to kind of check in on places could become a more routine part of our stewardship operation. 

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