DCC Update: October 2010

Update: October 2010

The strong south westerlies that marked September carried on into October, although in the latter half of the month the wind direction reversed, with strong north easterlies prevailing. Despite the strong winds the beach is well stocked with sand, with all access ways available.. It is hoped that the high beach profile (sand levels) will be maintained over the summer months, with more settled nor' easterly weather expected over the summer.

The investigation process into the old landfill site at Kettle Park continues and it is hoped that these studies will be largely completed before Christmas. It is likely that the thrust of the Team's report to Council and any consequential recommendations for action will be largely determined by the results of these landfill studies.

y2 = 4ax

Haven't done a post involving skateboarding or mathematics in a while, so here you go. I'm off to surf the quad in one of those tiny windows of swell and weather we currently have. Check out friend of the family Mike Machemer's new blog, Lenape Joking- it's good.

Surfing Around The World

Somewhere...



...North Island NZ (and I left this place why again?)...

...West Island, NZ...


...some very fine style in the UK (please note excellent lumber array on the Morrie's roof)...

...and the Netherlands!

But there's no surf here so I sit and gaze longingly at my quad and send thanks to the many correspondents who have shared their day at the beach with us.

Twinnies via Wegener and Beck

Jeff Beck goes hi-tech and lofi at the same time.


Jon Wegener's Handiwork

Ah, surfboard pictures- I love 'em. Since we've had 3 fins and 4 fins lately, here's a set of twins both look decidedly rideable. Jon Wegener again shows he knows what to do with fins on a board that seems to involve some very classic design elements used to great advantage, while Jeff at Ninelights goes all out modern construction (compsand 1lb EPS, balsa and cedar skin, cedar fins if I remeber rightly) on a supposedly outmoded setup. I don't deny that the thruster came along at the right time to completely reshape surfing, especially in the high performance arena, but the twins are rightly seeing a resurgence. The progress that was happening then seems to be continuing, and with all the new concepts that have come along since the mid-eighties, it's getting really good. There's some very interesting alternatives for those that are willing to venture along these paths.

Jetty Island

Saturday afternoon I took the kayak up to Everett and paddled across to Jetty Island. In the summer, the City runs a ferry over to the island and the main beach on the west side fills up with people enjoying the warm (relatively) water flooding in over the broad sand flats, but on this trip I had the whole place to myself.

The tide was high, so there wasn't much beach to walk on (and the upland portion of the island, at least the north end, is North America's densest thicket of Himalayan blackberry). I walked up to the northeastern tip of the island,
which was littered with remnants of old structures and lots of big wood, washed down the river and stranded on the beach. Then I wandered back to the main beach, the spit, and the lagoon.

Everett is located just south of the mouth of the Snohomish River (as was the historic Tulalip community of Hibulb, long before Everett Colby's father founded the city). The shallow subtidal foredelta of the river extends out into Port Gardner, making deep water access difficult, so a century ago, a jetty (training structure or breakwater?) was constructed to channel the main stem of the river southward along the waterfront (see the aerial photo linked to the title of this post). Dredged sand was placed on the western side of this structure and gradually a new island was built. In 1989, the Port of Everett used the dredged material to create an artificial berm - basically a spit, that in turn formed a large tidal lagoon.

Jetty Island is a Puget Sound anomaly. It is all sand, river sand, unlike most of our gravelly beaches, which get their sediment from eroding bluffs and small, steep streams. It is completely artificial - this entire area was shallow sand flats historically. And it is the largest beach nourishment project on the Sound and the only one built from dredged river sand. It is a frequently cited example (particularly by the Corps) of beneficial use (of dredged sediment).

Some folks note that the ecological picture painted at Jetty Island isn't really true restoration (they're right). Others seem more put off by the blackberries and invasive species than they are impressed by the salt marsh and the birds. And some people are just leery of pretty much everything the Corps of Engineers does (not an unwarranted skepticism). But ultimately, this is a pretty neat place. Maybe they ought to build something like this outboard of the Shilshole breakwater or along a section of the railroad grade!

Lost In The Ether

Mick Mackie riding one of his sidecut rocket fish, image Kidman from 'Lost In The Ether'


Garth Dickinson with a Mackie sidecut fish, reworked image Kidman from 'Glass Love'
Frame by Joe Curren who will do just as nice of a job framing art for you if you'd like.

Lost In The Ether is Andrew Kidman's new film. It further develops the themes he's worked on in his last two films and it features some brilliant surfboard designers. Here's Garth Dickinson talking about Mackie:

Garth: Peak moments he calls them, “I’m always looking for Peak moments,” he says. I think the other thing that’s unreal is; having a shaper that lives around the corner and he’s your mate and he sees you surf all the time. I think that’s a real privilege to have that kind of situation. Also he’s such a great surfer, he’s just a classic guy to hang out with.

The film is initially only available from Andrew directly by going here and it's in a signed and numbered edition of 1000 copies, packaged with an 80 page hardbound book. It will be very good indeed I'm sure.

Simmons Style

I doubt that just a few years ago when John Elwell, Richard Kenvin and Joe Bauguess collaborated to re-envision the legendary small Simmons board they had any idea what they were about to unleash (although I'd bet they all claim they did). The mini Simmons has become a bit of a cult inside alternative board design circles, probably the most copied board of the last few years (and worst copied- how may of those purported legit mini-Sims out there were shaped from nothing more than a photo on the internet and a vague idea of who Bob Simmons was?) It's also provided a new design springboard for a lot of people to work from, and some very cool cross pollinating has taken place. Here's probably the earliest re-envision of the re-envision, and RK 's crew are still making them beautifully. Keels out on the wings for that planing goodness, pulled in tail that's still within Lindsay Lord's specifications for clean water release, and a little trailing fin for added bite. I like these boards a lot, they're fast, responsive and feel really solid in the turns. Hank Warner shaped this one and it's a beaut. Although it's hard to get a good idea from a bad photo, I can assure you this board (a 5'8" I believe) felt very, very good under the arm. As with the quad from the previous post and the asym a couple back I really wish you could actually heft the thing yourself, see how the rails blend so nicely into the deck and how the foil works, feel the lovely balance of the board and get that surge of 'I want to go surf' excitement. I'm getting that quad in the water tomorrow finally. I'm stoked, surfboards are things of great beauty.

Post surf quad update:
Yes.
Yes,yes,yes.
Yes indeed, yes.
And that was a short session in smallish but OK waves with a few longboards clogging it up.
The quad is a thing of great beauty and amazing function.
Stoked.

Elwha Delta

This is a little out of order - I managed to skip over it when posting other entries last week. These shots go back about two weeks.

The Elwha River drains the northern interior of the Olympic Mountains, arriving at the coast in a gravelly delta a few miles west of Port Angeles. The river mouth shifts around, although maybe not as much as it did before the levees were built in the lower valley - including one immediately west of the mouth that has recently been raised. The mouth is a complex set of coarse gravel spits, bars, and islands and a number of small lakes and lagoons.

The delta projects well out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca where it is influenced both by waves and swell from the west, as well as storm waves from the northeast. The beach on the western side, facing Freshwater Bay, is a broad crescent and longshore transport may be fairly balanced (aerial view). On the eastern side, however, the beach that fronts the delta is eroding rapidly and sediment is moved eastward down the coast towards Ediz Hook in Port Angeles (previous posts on this stretch of shoreline).

The Elwha's two high dams are supposed to start coming out next year. It may be some time before the gravel behind the dams shows up at the coast, but maybe the delta will see more immediate changes due to differences in flood events or the release of fine sediment. This is going to be a neat place to watch over the next decade.

Pioneer

I titled this post "Pioneer" since that's what the sign along the railroad calls it - and since Pioneer was the major operator of the huge gravel pits that marked this site for the most of the 20th century. I could have called it Chambers Creek, since it lies just north of the creek and because the whole place is now managed as "Chambers Creek Properties", including its brand new premier golf course. But I'd rather reserve that title for the Creek itself - which I have (Chambers Creek-2008).

The 200' gravel-rich bluffs once reached to the Sound (historical photo), but they were excavated back a kilometer to help build Seattle and Tacoma and all the roads that connect them. Now there is a rolling reclaimed landscape - part treatment plant, part park, and of course, part golf course. The railroad still runs along the shoreline, but there is now a new overpass connecting the park to its two mile long beach. Or at least two miles when the tide isn't too high, since there are places it runs up against the railroad riprap at high tide.

Sequalitchew Creek

Sequalitchew Creek is trapped in a narrow ravine between the former Dupont munitions plant (now Northwest Landing, a large planned development, and its golf course) and the big still-operating gravel pit to the north. The original Fort Nisqually (established in 1833 by the Hudson's Bay Company and the first European settlement in Washington) was located on this creek.

The creek empties into the Sound just north of the Nisqually Delta through a small estuary, or at least it did prior to the Northern Pacific building a railroad along this shoreline in the late 1800s. The creek now reaches the beach through a small box culvert below the mainline from Seattle to Portland. A small marsh remains trapped in the valley above the railroad embankment.

A narrow gauge rail line used to serve the munitions plant, running down the ravine, passing under the mainline, and out to a pier (long unused, but only recently removed). You can walk down the old grade to the marsh, through the short tunnel, and then emerge suddenly, and spectacularly, at the beach and the Sound.

Yukon Harbor

The road was probably built on the back of the beach a century ago. Sea level is probably 20-25 cms higher since then, and the big house on the artificial point just north has trapped any sediment originally destined to rebuild this beach, so the road was getting undermined.

They could have dumped rock - such an easy, cheap, ugly, and often not completely successful solution. But instead, they tried anchoring logs on the beach face and reinforcing the soils on the bank with geofabric. I don't know the whole story here, but I wish we had the resources to monitor more of these (other than brief visits while racing to the late afternoon ferry). We could actually start to learn something. And then we could tweak the design, not just bury it under riprap next winter when the storms roll in.

I believe the logs are intended to act like sills and help perch a slightly higher beach behind them, reducing wave action at the bank. Sometimes this approach works, but often it does not, with beaches rising and falling as if they are oblivious to the logs' intended role. Here, I don't think the logs have hurt, I'm just not sure they've added much.

The geotextile is "softer" than riprap and allows for planting if it doesn't unravel, but it has neither the resistance to erosion (and floating logs) of something more durable, nor the ability to act like a natural gravel berm. I suppose a more substantial gravel berm might have been worked a little better here, although there might still have been need for some structural elements and some occasional maintenance - in the form of a truckload of sandy gravel every couple of years. But ultimately, there just isn't much room to work where the beach is narrowest. These sites are never easy.

Manchester

Boat ramps are notorious for acting like groins and for paving over viable beach habitat. It's hard to bury one's eggs in concrete. So in several places on the Sound, new ramps have been built like this, bridging over the beach. Others can be found in Allyn, Silverdale, and a few other spots. Like any bridging structure or pier, they can trap drift logs and then they begin to act like groins - which means some maintenance is required. It also seems to matter how they are oriented. If wave action is oblique, it is more likely to transport sediment under and past the structure. But if wave action is more normal to the beach, sediment tends to accumulate beneath the structure, which shouldn't be a surprise, but sort of defeats the purpose of allowing unimpeded sediment transport.

I like this little park - it's got great views across the Sound at our local metropolis. The edge of the lawn is a little ragged, as it is built on fill and the waves want to nibble way at it, but generally it is doing fine. This is a nice little sandy beach - at least by the coarse standard of this region.

Clam Bay

The beach on the northwest side of Clam Bay was once a spit with a lagoon tucked in behind. But the lagoon made a convenient dumping ground and became a cleanup site. It is ironic that it is also now the site of an EPA and Department of Ecology Laboratory and that there is a NOAA Fisheries lab at the head of the bay.

The site of the old lagoon was capped with clean fill, but instead of armoring the shoreline (which consisted of various nasty things corroding out of the gravel), they built a beach. The beach has adaptively managed itself a little since it was constructed, with some erosion occurring at the southeastern (updrift) end and a new berm forming farther bayward at the western end, but all in all its done quite nicely (or so it appears to this casual observer) and sure beats a foreshore covered with basalt boulders and quarry spalls.