Washed Ashore

S3010037,
originally uploaded by foxpaw.

Me and Mirella went down to Newport Beach last night just to walk around and relax. As we got close to the shore we noticed big mounds on the beach that from far away we couldn't really tell what they were. When we got closer we saw that they were big piles of mostly wood, most of which looked like bamboo. Along with the big mounds there was also a bunch of it scattered right on the shore, apparently washed up from the ocean. Some of the pieces still had their roots attached, leading us to believe that most of this debris had been uprooted from somewhere. The only two possible explanations we could think of was that it got washed out to see during the rainstorms we just had, or that it got washed out here from halfway across the world where the tsunami hit. Southern California isn't really known for it's bamboo forests, so is it possible that all this stuff floated over all the way from Southeast Asia? I searched Google to see if there was anything in the news about massive amounts of bamboo being washed ashore but all I could find were articles on pollution caused by the rain (because of sewage systems overflowing) and a bunch of jumbo squid washing ashore. We didn't see any jumbo squid last night, and I'm kind of bummed about that. If you click on the image up there on the left it'll link you to a set of pictures on Flickr with a few more pictures of the big piles of stuff, and a slipper.

We took a piece of bamboo home as a souvenir.