February 8, 2021

Temperature: 50 F. Cloud Cover: Partly Cloudy. Wind Velocity: Calm/Light. Wind Direction: N. Tide Level: -0.8 feet.

Number of people: 20. Number of dogs: 4. Walking or running: 10. Playing in sand: 3. Sitting: 4. Tidepooling: 4. Fishing: 1. Other Activities: I saw about 20 people during my entire walk and maybe four dogs. Most were just casually walking, some are exploring the sea stars and mussels on the jetty, revealed by the minus tide. Lots of sea stars! One guy explicitly came to get mussels off of the jetty for his marinara sauce for dinner, took him about 20 minutes to gather the mussels.

Small rocks, Seaweeds and seagrass, Shells, Wood pieces, Styrofoam. The extra low tide shows a vast expanse of beach sand swept clean. I could barely detect a wrackline. As the tide receded it left just a few scattered wood pieces and pebbles and an occasional piece of shell or strand of seaweed, a few ropes of kelp. A couple of pieces of styrofoam, including one large barrel-sized chunk. Very little debris whether near the water or up at the high tide driftline. But this was the first time I had been to Nadona Beach since the King tides and I couldn't believe the amount of logs and pieces of wood that washed up all over the beach. I couldn’t really figure out if this was all new batch of logs churned up by the king tides, or if the storm surge breached the first low line of dunes pulled closer to the sea some of the enormous log graveyard (as I think of it) up near the jetty. Now there’s a ton of logs piled up on the sea side of the dunes (the low dunes nearest the water are virtually flat now), then a sort of new strip of sand beach between those and the older piles in the log graveyard. All along 295 huge logs are now sprinkled across the top of or fully over the dunes. Enterprising people have built some new sea forts out of logs, but it looked like most of the forts that had been there for the last few months were swept away by the King Tides.

Erosion of vegetated foredune, Visible retreat of solid bluff, Evidence of wave overtopping. Walking south from the jetty, it is clear that the fierce tides made a sharp vertical cut into the dunes, so that now they do resemble bluffs. All the beach entrances are now rather difficult because of a sharp drop at the end of the sandy path walk-in. In some stretches the vertical cut is about three feet, whereas before the dunes were gently sloped. In other stretches the vertical cut may be 7-10 feet high, way over my head, impossible to escape a sneaker wave by trying to scale these bluffs. I could see that logs were newly pushed up above the front dunes/bluffs, at least along some of the mile. But the sharp edge of the dunes flattened out here and there, including at the entrance used by rescue vehicles (I wonder if workers added sand to smooth out this entrance, as they did at the Rockaway Wayside entrance). In many sections of the vertical bluff, earlier sediments of washed-in logs are now visible way below the present surface of the dunes, as if the sea conducted a sort of archaeological dig, exposing layers of other earlier king tide deposits. It looks like some of the lower foredunes were just completely eroded back maybe by 15-20 feet. In several areas the bluff edge is way farther into shore than where the outer dunes used to be. This is not good news for the houses placed not very far from the dunes. A whole fir tree horizontally embedded in the sand resembled the wreck of a ship, its branches bowed like the ship's ribs, nature's Peter Iredale wreck.