Beach Bonfire

Lots of wood washes up on the beach, and if it's not controlled it takes over a beach like this:

Since I don't want my beach to look like that I have a bonfire whenever I can. For example, if I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, I'll putt out to the beach and have a fire. I think about you other poor saps that get up and watch ancient TV shows to try to get back to sleep, but you made your choices and I made mine.

Below I document a number of fires we had, the goal was to burn off a 70 foot log that washed up in the winter. First, a balloon cam shot of the log on the beach.

We found that logs on the beach attract scum, boaters that trash the beach. This log had attracted a bunch that burned all their bottles and cans and left 50 pounds of trash behind. I hate cleaning up after these people but I am not going to leave my island trashed either. That's why I have patrolled the beach since 1999. When I started I would come back from a beach walk with my pockets bulging with broken glass I had picked up, and I would do that 4-8 times a weekend. Now, I am lucky to find a single piece of glass on the beach. But to stay ahead of it I have to clean up after these scumbags, I don't want to let the beach get back to the point where every step could result in a cut foot.

Anyway, back to the fire. I decided to do this one in stages, it's just not possible to burn the whole log in one shot. First I cut four 6 foot logs off and used a comealong to pile them along side one end of the remaining log. That night we fired that puppy up. You can see our lawn chairs nearby and an anchored ship's lights out in the river.

The leftovers where pretty large, so I burned them a couple more times. Then I finished sawing up the rest of the log and stood the pieces on end hoping they would burn faster. Here is a shot of that fire.

The leftovers of that fire were still pretty large, and though some of them had been appropriated by some other pyro there was still plenty of wood, so I restacked them on their sides. Then later we came out to light it up, plus it was just before the 4th of July, so we brought along some fireworks and the telescope to check out the planets.

After the 4th I cleaned the beach (why I continue to do this I don't know) and found that the scum aboard "Knot Enough Time" had burned a bunch of cans and a champagne bottle with my leftovers. I decided I would get rid of all the wood on this part of the beach so I chopped up all the leftovers and some extra stuff that had washed up in the meantime into two foot long rounds. Here is the pile before the fire. There are 40 large pieces of wood here.

And here is the final fire.

I added a firelog in the morning to keep it going, finally there was nothing left. I did come back a week later with the metal detector and a magnet to pick up the few spikes that were in some of the pieces. Now the beach is clean and hopefully the scum will find somewhere else to beach.