Margie sent this photo a few weeks ago, along with this note: Attached is a photo of some, but not all, of the shoes I picked up in just a couple of hours this morning. The seaweed is beginning to come in pretty thick and is, as usual, full of floating shoes. All of the shoes in the photo are drifters, not the ones forgotten on the beach by visitors. I get a lot of those, too. (For you new readers, Margie is the beach coordinator for the City of Cocoa Beach, and mornings will find her tooling up and down the beach on her four-wheeler, picking up everything from injured critters to launch trash.)
Curt Ebbesmeyer had Bill Blazek and Margie documenting drift shoes for a while. Margie notes: Bill may still be doing it, but I quit after about three years. Curt was interested in whether certain beaches attract left or right shoes. I collected over 500 shoes and kept a spread sheet with an entry every day I found any drift shoes. My data showed no statistical difference between the arrival of lefts and rights, but Curt eventually concluded, from what data I don't know, that there are left and right beaches. If I remember correctly, he mentions it in his book. I know I've heard him say it in a talk.
Curt is the keynote speaker at this year's Sea-Bean Symposium, so I'll be sure to ask him. Meanwhile, there are pages and pages of Internet "hits" for Curtis Ebbesmeyer - here's a good one that talks about his shoe theory.
Curt Ebbesmeyer had Bill Blazek and Margie documenting drift shoes for a while. Margie notes: Bill may still be doing it, but I quit after about three years. Curt was interested in whether certain beaches attract left or right shoes. I collected over 500 shoes and kept a spread sheet with an entry every day I found any drift shoes. My data showed no statistical difference between the arrival of lefts and rights, but Curt eventually concluded, from what data I don't know, that there are left and right beaches. If I remember correctly, he mentions it in his book. I know I've heard him say it in a talk.
Curt is the keynote speaker at this year's Sea-Bean Symposium, so I'll be sure to ask him. Meanwhile, there are pages and pages of Internet "hits" for Curtis Ebbesmeyer - here's a good one that talks about his shoe theory.
1 comment:
No pairs? Too bad there are so many shoes floating around. Need a lost and found for the ocean
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