Every other practice on this shore is downstream of the water. The wrack line, the ragged band of material a tide leaves at its high point, is where that becomes visible: eelgrass and widgeon grass torn loose from the shallows, driftwood, shell, crab pot floats and whatever the last storm moved. It restocks itself twice a day and reads differently in every season.
This section documents the shore as a supplier. It covers what a single tide deposits, how a wrack line can be sorted without a laboratory, what the material is worth once it reaches a workbench, and what should be left where it lies. The underwater grasses that supply most of the plant material are surveyed every year: since 1984 the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has flown a bay wide aerial survey of submerged aquatic vegetation for the Chesapeake Bay Program, which is the primary record these pages point to.
