Beach stones, sea glass, Northern Rock Barnacle (Semibalanus balanoides), pottery shards, Blue Mussels (Mytilus edulis), plastic plant tag, Rock Crab (Cancer irroratus), manmade aggregate, plastic wadding (from a shotgun, maybe?), Atlantic Oyster (Crassostrea virginica), aluminum bottle top, unidentified seed, freshwater mussel?, duct tape, styrofoam, Green Crab (Carcinus maenas), plastic fragment, mutated Blue Mussel, sea brick, and Horse Mussel (Modiolus modiolus).

The Maine State 420 Championships were in Castine last week (a 420 is a kind of sailboat), and my son was competing, so I spent a day on the waterfront, beachcombing and watching the races from afar. The day started out in the low 70s, cloudy and humid with a very light breeze from the southwest. Fortunately for the sailors, the wind picked up, the sun came came out, and it turned into a glorious summer day. The races were organized at Maine Maritime Academy, which is right next to the Town Dock, and there was a nice little wooden stairway to the beach from their parking lot, which you can just see at the bottom of the photo below (taken from the rooftop patio at MMA.)

See the low walls running perpendicular to the beach? You just don’t see that on Mount Desert Island. I guess people in Castine are more defensive of their turf. One cool thing you can see in this photo is the way the walls affect the motion of the water across the beach. Look at the point where the wall meets the shore – you can see a lighter triangle there. That’s the line of the current, roughly 45º to the wall, almost like a shadow. You can see the current has deposited more stones, shells, and seaweed outside of that ‘shadow.’

I did wander past the wall, but it felt uncomfortably like trespassing and I didn’t go far. I was mostly curious about the change in the beach composition. Just past that second wall the shoreline is rocky as far as I could see, and I was trying to figure out why this small portion is sand. It seemed highly unlikely that MMA would import sand onto the beach – it’s an industrial wharf, and this is docked just out of the photo to the left:

That’s MMA’s training ship, the State of Maine. Even though she was docked, her engines were running, and their deep thrum was the soundtrack to my morning.

So whence the sand? I know so little about oceanography that for me trying to read the shoreline is like trying be Sherlock Holmes without having written a monograph on 140 kinds of cigarette ash.

By the way, it’s hard to get a sense of how huge that anchor chain is until you have, say, a pair of size 9 feet for scale:

 There were dense patches of shells near the water – mostly Common Periwinkle and Blue Mussel

 with the occasional bit of sea glass:

Barnacle-monogram on a stone: “EH”

One reason the sand seems such an anomaly is that the flotsam was very similar to what I find back home on rocky shorelines; the only really unusual thing I found was this Northern Sea Star (Asterias vulgaris) (which was either half-dead or mostly-dead but I put it back in the water anyway because I’m an optimist.) This might be only the third or fourth I’ve found beached in 17 years of beachcombing.

This will be my last Beachcombing series for August as I leave for France on Monday. Don’t worry – the series will resume in September. Meanwhile, brace yourselves for a gazillion photos of pastry!

Rock Crab (Cancer irroratus), sea glass, driftwood, sea brick, beach stones, Green Crab (Carcinus maenas), champagne cork, crumpled aluminum can parts, polypropylene rope, Common Periwinkle (Littorina littorea), Blue Mussel (Mytilus edulis), lobster-claw band, Dog Whelk (Nucella lapillus)

After the parade on the Fourth of July our family packed up for a picnic, where we feasted on the lobster rolls and blueberry pie we had prepared the night before. The kids rowed around in a dinghy while the grownups lolled around talking and digesting – a peaceful interlude between the frenzy of the parade and the spectacle of the fireworks.

It was a really good week for striped stones!

And I’ll leave you with a photo of one my husband’s famous blueberry pies – they’re delicious and cheerful!

When my daughter was four, she wanted to be a pastry chef. When she was six, she wanted to be a sushi chef and a pastry chef, and planned to open a restaurant here in Bar Harbor “after college.” I was all for that plan, as sushi and pastry are two of my favorite things ever. “You’ll get a discount, Mommy.” Aww, thanks sweetie.

Well, now she’s thirteen, will probably kill me for posting that, and still loves baking. Now I can make a pretty tasty sushi roll, but bread and pastry are not in my skill set, and this summer I finally found someone who could teach her the interesting things one can do with flour, water, and yeast. My friend Andrea recently moved to the Island from New York City. She writes a tantalizing food blog called From the Bookshelf and gives lessons to people in their homes. Perfect! We rounded up a couple of my daughter’s friends, and the Summer of Baking began.

For their first lesson, they made Apple Cheddar Scones, and Andrea worked with Tabby on her knife skills. There’s a trick to paring apples! After grating the cheese (above) they mixed the batter

formed a round of dough,  sliced it into scones

and slipped them into the oven:

The air slowly filled with the smell of baking cheddar, and by the time the scones came out, everyone in the house was hovering around the kitchen. Yum!

In the lessons that followed they’ve made big chewy soft pretzels

Learning to knead properly.

Brushing the pretzels with egg yolk for a shiny finish.

(Sorry, we ate the pretzels before I could take a photo of the finished ones.)

And they made divinely sticky sticky buns:

There is a right way to knead dough.

And while they were waiting for the dough to rise they sort of tossed off a round of blueberry muffins, because why not?

This week they are mastering pie crust – Monday they made Lemon Meringue (ohmygoditwasgood) and on Friday (which is the last lesson of the summer, sob) they will make quiche. I am soooo looking forward to Friday dinner.

I’ll end with this photo of Andrea, because it is just too frickin’ cute how her t-shirt matches her bowl:

So, Andrea, thanks for making this the most awesome summer for my kid!

Photo ©2014 George Soules

My friend George is working on a series of 100 environmental portraits, and I got to be part of it! (An environmental portrait is one that shows a person in their own space, like their home or workplace, so for me that had to be a rocky, barnacle-covered beach.)  Normally I hate having my picture taken, but George is a lot of fun to work with, and I think these are pretty cool. Take a look at some of the other portraits on his website, there’s some beautiful work there.

Photo ©2014 George Soules

Another absolutely gorgeous summer day in Maine, and I was back at College of the Atlantic. In town it was humid and sticky, but on the beach the sun was pleasantly  warm and the breeze was pleasantly cool, and a hazy fog drifted out from the Porcupines but never quite reached us.

I shared the beach with a group of Field Studies kids. They caught a lot of crabs, which I duly admired in between clambering over rocky outcrops to investigate tidepools. Most were European Green Crabs (like the one in the photo) which have become a real problem in our area, driving out the indigenous species.

More sea glass today,

and more striped rocks,

and an insect swimming pool! I don’t know yet what these are, but don’t worry, they weren’t drowning, just swimming around.

Horse Mussel (Modiolus modiolus), sea glass, beach stones, Dog Whelk (Nucella lapillus)

A half-hearted rain shower started just after I reached the beach, but I could see blue sky all around, so I just tucked my backpack under a tree and started beachcombing. The rain passed and it turned into a beautiful day, slightly overcast (which makes for better photos than harsh sun) but warm and humid with occasional patches of clear sunshine.

I could hear the crew setting up for Diver Ed’s morning tour, and waved to Edna as she headed up the dock to greet the passengers.

Out among the rocks and seaweed I found all kinds of interesting things:

 sea stars,

striped rocks,

sea urchins,

 rockweed and barnacles,

 hot pink granite,

big, fat mussels,

a gazillion periwinkles,

and the weirdest sea glass ever:

Time traveling again, way way back to April 28. Fortunately, I took notes while beachcombing, so I can tell you it was cold out on the Bluffs, overcast with a stiff north wind and rough seas. A few gulls gathered overhead, probably curious about whether I had found anything tasty in the wrack. Over on Instagram I’ve been sharing the process of composing a still life, and I’ll summarize it for you here. (I’ve fallen in love with Instagram and started sharing  works-in-progress over there. If you’re on IG, leave your user name in the comments and I’ll come find you!)

First, I dumped out the bag of rinsed and dried flotsam onto my light table, and freaked out a bit at the impossibility of ever organizing it:

When in doubt, apply logic – I sorted out the different materials like metal, wood, shells, plastic:

And that led to sorting by color, which led to the Rainbow Organizational Strategy (aka Unicorn Vomit):

which led very very slowly to the final composition at the top of the post. And then I swept everything off the light table and did this, because why not?

Ingredients of the first photo: Dog Whelks (Nucella lapillus), granite and other beach stones, Waved whelk (Buccinum undatum), Moon Snail (Lunatia heros) , Common Periwinkles (Littorina littorea), Knotted Wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum), Lobster tail (Homarus americanus), balloon tail, lobster trap tag, sea glass, sea brick, lobster-claw bands, plastic-coated wires, mysterious thing that might be computer-innards, fishing-industry tag, European Green Crab shells (Carcinus maenas), plastic tail-light fragment, fragment of styrofoam cup, unidentified styrofoam bit, plastic shotgun wadding, Blue Mussel (Mytilus edulis), wire, aluminum soda can top, weird chunk of heavy rubbery material.

Ingredients of the second photo: European Green Crab shells (Carcinus maenas), lobster-claw band, plastic tail-light fragments, plastic-coated wire, beach stones, Common Periwinkles (Littorina littorea), sea brick, Lobster tail (Homarus americanus), lobster trap tag, mysterious thing that might be computer-innards, Rock Crab (Cancer irroratus), balloon tail,  sea glass, fishing-industry tag.

So I got a little distracted from the parameters I set for the Beachcombing photos – the sea glass and beach stones were so entertaining they each got their own photo. I sort of forgot about science and went with plain old joy. Isn’t the variety among these rocks amazing?

I think the title of the latest Barcelona Beachcombing photo (“Just the Sea Glass”) is pretty self-explanatory. This is probably the closest I will ever get to working in stained glass!

Two of the Beachcombing photos are now available as limited edition prints through the online gallery Eye Buy Art.  I’ve also worked with curator Emily McInnes to offer custom ‘portraits’ of your own collections. You might remember Kristi’s seaglass and Danielle’s collections. However, where Kristi and Danielle both approved my selling prints of their collections, the custom portraits will be one-of-a-kind. We thought it would be especially exciting to do a dual collection for a newlywed couple of each person’s most cherished little-things. There’s a lovely feature in the gallery’s Wedding Guide about commissioning one: http://issuu.com/eyebuyart/docs/weddingguidep_73ee304d6bd952/1

If you’ve never visited the site, go right now – Emily has curated an impressive collection of incredibly talented photographers, and I’m both amazed and pleased-as-punch to find myself in their company. (If you’re a creative type you probably know this feeling of “Yes, I am awesome” warring with “Who, me?”)

I’m particularly drawn to Eszter Burghardt’s woolly landscapes:

Fjord of Wool by Eszter Burghardt, via eyebuyart.com

and to Amy Stevens’ cake-and-fabric confections:

Confections #44, 2007 by Amy Stevens, via eyebuyart.com

and to Kevin Van Aelst’s fingerprints:

Left Ring Finger, 2007, by Kevin Van Aelst, via eyebuyart.com

Dear Santa,

Please consider this my Christmas list.

Love,

Jenn