After the east wind: what a winter storm leaves along the strandline

What the east wind does

The storms that matter on this coast come from the east and north-east, with a long reach of open sea behind them. They raise the water level along the shore, push waves high up the beach and strip the upper sand, and when they ease they leave a new line of debris well above where the sea normally reaches. In a bad one, the beach promenades in the Maresme towns are closed and the sand is carried off in visible quantities, which the towns spend the spring replacing.

I do not go out during the storm itself. The waves on the rocky points are dangerous and the beaches are closed with good reason. I go on the first morning the wind has dropped and turned, ideally with a little sun, and I walk the strandline slowly from one end of a beach to the other, then back along a line a few metres lower, because each surge of the storm left its own line.

Seagrass banks and the fibre balls

The biggest thing a winter storm brings ashore is seagrass, the long ribbon-like leaves of the meadows that grow on the sandy bottom offshore. It arrives in thick brown banks, sometimes waist-high against a wall, and it smells of iodine and old tea. The banks are not rubbish. They protect the beach from the next storm and feed a whole community of small animals, and the better-managed beaches leave them in place over winter.

Mixed into the banks are the fibre balls, tight round or oval felted balls of seagrass fibre, from the size of a walnut to that of a fist, rolled together by wave action on the seabed. They are one of my favourite things on this coast, and after a big storm there can be thousands of them along one beach. I have a few on the kitchen windowsill from my first winter, which I no longer add to, because they are part of the beach's own material and there is no shortage of photographs.

What else turns up

Cuttlebones are the most common find after seagrass, white and light, some chewed at the edges by gulls. Occasionally a storm drives in a raft of by-the-wind sailors, small blue floating animals with a clear stiff sail, which cover the tideline in a blue fringe for a day or two before drying to papery transparent discs. Pen shell fragments show up on the Garraf beaches, where the big fan-shaped shells used to be common offshore, and each one is now a small sad reminder of how badly they have declined.

I also keep a list of the rubbish, and in most years it is longer than the list of anything else. Plastic bottle caps, cotton-bud sticks, fishing line, pieces of polystyrene and the small pale pellets of raw plastic all come in with the storm. I carry a cloth bag specifically for litter and fill it on every walk. It is the only thing I bring home from the beach in any quantity.

Every so often there is something harder to explain. A single wooden clog, a length of heavy rope with a knot I could not name, a plastic crate stencilled in a language I could not read, and once a well-worn fishing float of the old cork kind, which I photographed and left against the wall for whoever might want it. I note these on a separate line in the log, because they are the finds people ask me about, and because they are a reminder of how far a storm can carry things.

Keeping the strandline log

For every storm I record the date, the wind direction and peak strength from the nearest coastal station, how long it blew and how far up the beach the new strandline reached, measured roughly in strides from the wall. Then comes a tally of finds by category, a separate tally of rubbish, and one or two photographs of the same stretch of beach taken from the same spot. Over five winters the photographs alone are worth the habit.

The log has shown me that the best strandlines follow a storm that blew for at least two days from the east and then dropped suddenly, rather than one that died away slowly. A slow easing seems to let the sea pick back up much of what it brought. It has also shown me, less happily, that the rubbish tally does not fall from year to year, however many of us walk the beaches with bags.