Well, I say seagrass, right now it’s many bags of sand filled with seagrass seeds.
This past Sunday (11/09/22) the Tees River Trust was at North Gare Beach along with Stockton Dive club and 40 bags of seagrass seeds. Our goal was to deploy all of these bags in the estuary to create our very first seagrass trial site within the Tees. However, preparation for Sunday started on Friday (09/09/22) with the members of our team filling all 40 of our hessian sand bags with silver sand.
A quick and relatively easy job for a Friday afternoon, but come Saturday the tricky, fiddly work began. On Saturday morning a group of our staff came into the Trust’s Hartlepool facility to add our seagrass material to these bags. Most seagrass restoration methods which involve the use of hessian bags pack them with seagrass seeds however, for our initial trial plot the Trust had planned to use seagrass spathes (a sheathing bract enclosing the seagrass seeds). But the seagrass had other plans and instead we ended up using a mix of spathes and seagrass seeds. Packing each bag with seagrass material the bags were stored within the facility container overnight, each submerged underwater to prevent our seagrass material drying out.
With the bags packed and ready to go we come to Sunday. Starting at 9am the team arrived at the facility and loaded all 40 bags onto the trailer ready to go over to North Gare car park. Arriving at North Gare we now had the difficult task of getting 40 wet heavy bags from the car park to the beach. In the end this task was made manageable with the help of a trolley and two wheelbarrows loving referred to as Lesley, Bert, and Ernie.
As we ran back and forth from the car park a small portion of our team set about building our Jackstay lines. A jackstay is a line weighted down to the sea bed with a shot at each end to mark its location on the surface. With the bags on the beach and the jackstays built our wading team entered the water to begin setting up our planting area. Wading into the water at North Gare Beach we laid out 4 10-meter Jackstays each positioned a meter apart. Once we believed they were secure we waded back to shore to collect the first group of seagrass bags. The plan was to wade out and place 10 bags at the end of each jackstay line at which point the divers would take over and would position each back along the line, securing all bags into the sediment. However, when we returned to the jackstays with our first set our bags all four lines had been swept out of position and with the tide on the turn and coming in fast, we were rapidly running out of time.
We had to make a split-second decision it was clear that waders were shortly going to be out of their depth, the jackstays were not going to work, and we still had over half the bags still to plant. Luckily, we had a plan B, while divers would have allowed us to plant more accurately, at low tide North Gare’s water are relatively shallow allowing waders to access similar areas without the need of scuba equipment. So, with the realisation our initial plan wasn’t going to work we switched to plan B. Two of our wading team collected all the jackstay equipment, towing it back into shore while the remaining wader went in head to rely the new plan.
Racing against the tide our team planted the remaining seagrass bags right at the edge of the low tide mark, layout and securing the bags in the sediment all while the tide and waves crashed into use. However, we were able to secure all our remaining seagrass bags in the water and get everyone back up the shore before the tide overtook us.
With the seagrass in place there’s now very little the Trust can do. Going forwards we will continue to monitor the seagrass site, regularly checking the bags are still in place and making sure they survive the rough winter weather. Once spring begins, we will hopefully begin to see some growth from our seeds at which point we will begin to count numbers of shoots that appear and measuring individual plant growth. Surveys will be conducted every month during the lower tidal window of each month, as when the tide is above one meter, it will be too deep to be able to accurately assess the seagrass.
So, if you are walking North Gare Beach at low tide and come across a group of bags berried in the sand, don’t worry. These bags are the first step to seagrass in the Tees estuary and while they might not look like much now, give them some time and over the course of the next year or so we will hopefully be beginning to see a few shoots begin to appear.