35. Station 3 at the base of the dune was unusually coarse and poorly 

 sorted, indicating that a coarse lag component was mixed with storm wave 

 deposits at extreme high-water levels and finer wind- transported material 

 during fair weather. The berm samples (Stations 4 and 5) exhibited the 

 bimodal distribution with the secondary mode centered around 1.0 mm (0 <j>) 

 becoming more dominant on sampling days after storms had deposited sediment on 

 the berm through swash processes. 



36. Station 6 was the only sampling station in the intertidal area 

 between mean high water (MHW) and mean low water (MLW) . Bascom (1959) sug- 

 gested that if only one sample could be collected to represent the grain size 

 of a beach, the best position to use as a reference sampling site was the 

 midtide area. Samples collected at MHW, midtide, and MLW were found to best 

 characterize the beach for sand suitability determination for beach fills 

 (Stauble, Hansen, and Blake 1985). During the study, Station 6 sediment sam- 

 ples were collected somewhat randomly throughout the intertidal area and made 

 it difficult to characterize this important zone. The samples had a widest 

 variation in sediment distribution through time with the largest temporal 

 variation in mean grain size. At times, the main component of this commonly 

 bimodal distribution centered around the gravel range of 11.3 to 5.66 mm 

 (-3.5 to -2.5 <f>) and was composed of predominantly iron- stained quartz sands 

 and rock fragments. Most of the times the coarse distribution occurred was 

 after storm events, except on 15 July 1985 during a low wave energy period, 

 when Station 6 also contained this coarse distribution. A possible explana- 

 tion could be that the sampling that particular day was on a cusp, which can 

 accumulate coarse material on its horn. The other sampling days had distribu- 

 tions similar to that shown in Figure 14. 



37. The larger variation in grain-size distributions of the beach group 

 can be seen on Figure 15, where the mean grain size for each individual sample 

 is plotted against the sorting. A general trend is a fining of mean grain 

 sizes as one moves from the dune base to the foreshore with a better sorting. 

 The coarse and more poorly sorted samples at Stations 4 and 6 deposited after 

 storm events can be seen to the left of the tightly grouped data points at 

 each station. The sediment deposition is under the influence of uprush and 

 backwash processes in this region of the profile. A common trend shown at all 

 stations is that the finer means have a better sorting, whereas the coarser 

 samples have a wider range of poorer sorting values . 



45 



