What types of shells are most abundant at your favorite shelling beach?
What is your favorite aspect of shelling?
Do you have a preferred season for shelling?
Do you shell rain or shine?
For how long have you liked shelling?
Are your family members/friends/significant others supportive of your hobby or do they think it’s dumb?
What are your favorite types of shells?
Do you spend hours on end staring at the ground while everyone around you is playing in the water?
What is the coolest shell in your collection?
What do you do with the shells once you’ve brought them home?
How do you clean your shells?
What shell do you hope to collect next?
What kind of shell do you have the most of?
What’s the coolest non-shell item you’ve found?
Shelling is a recent hobby of mine and I love doing it and talking about it. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a loser but considering what the majority of kids my age do in their free time (drink, party, have unprotected sex, do drugs, idolize celebrities, etc) I’m perfectly fine with being a loser.
You’re my kind of loser. I live above a small beach south of Seattle, WA. It’s pretty rocky and the beach is covered with shell “crumbs” after they’ve been pounded against the rocks by the water, but I do find whole shells a lot of times, too. I don’t really have any favorites-a nice example of any shell makes me happy. Mostly what we get are clam, scallop, razor clam and fancy snail shells. I also collect small, interesting pieces of wood. I have this idea that I’m going to glue them all together and make a sculpture type thing for our entry. I saw it on HGTV once and though it was a great excuse to keep collecting.
When I get home I rinse them in tap water and let them dry. I’ll reinforce intact bi-valves with super glue so they don’t come apart. Right now I carefully stack them on a small table in the rec room. It makes for a nice display, but I do have to dust them occasionally.
I walk on the beach several times a week at low tide in any kind of weather, for most of the year. I sometimes skip it in the summer because there are too many people. I’ve done this since I was a kid-my Mom enjoys it as well, and definitely passed it on. It’s a treasure hunt!
The coolest non-shell things I’ve found are starfish. Of course I don’t collect them! But I do collect their pictures. When the tide is very, very low sometimes they’ll be stranded. Last Easter was beautiful and I braved the crowds. No one was walking in the mucky part near the water, but I did and visited with the coolest starfish I’d ever seen, it had over 20 arms!! I must’ve taken a hundred pictures. That day I also saw a regular five-arm starfish as well. That was my only two-starfish day.
I’m sure I missed some of your questions, but I got most of them, I think.
I missed the edit window, but wanted to add that we had a huge wind storm today. It was crazy down at the beach so I didn’t walk, just watched from an area where the waves weren’t crashing against the wall! While I’ll miss one low tide (I think it’s right about now, 11pm on the west coast), I’m hoping that the low tide at 10:30am tomorrow will still reveal some treasures the wind whipped up.
No answers to your questions, but I just wanted to present this view from landlocked Minnesota: I hate you guys!
No, not really, but if I lived within reach of an ocean I would spend all my time beachcombing. My dream vacation consists of several weeks of that and tide pool exploration.
The MN version of what you describe involves sitting on a rock beach on Lake Superior picking through the pebbles for agates :(.
While not exactly a hobby per-se, I have quite an assortment of shells lining the porch and walkways. Helps that I live right on the beach in Cayman.
Most are queen conch shells, but there are several whelks and assorted small bivalves.
Aside from shells, we gets lots of debris washing up on shore. There are quite a lot of shoes among the garbage that washes up with each storm. There were enough so that a couple gathered up more than 300 in one day and nailed them to a tree. The Cayman Shoe Tree is now a landmark and a reminder of marine pollution.
But the coolest looking non-shell debris are the all natural seed pods that wash up. Some of them would make you think that they must be a man made wood inlay decoration of some sort.
From all around the south seas I have a large collection of seashells. I don’t have a favourite beach, any beach will do!
I have them displayed in my house, in large glass vases. The slightest interest expressed by guests and they are all laid out on the dining room table-hours of fun!
I have no plan for what to collect next, but I’m off to the Indian Ocean in a few weeks, and counting on finding new and amazing shells, while there.
I have numerous reference books, but am longing for an app for my device, and cannot imagine why there isn’t one already!
Of course I also collect fossils, rocks and feathers, so I’m just a collector at heart, I suppose.
FL panhandle here on the Gulf of Mexico. Beach combing is addictive in a coffee kind of way, best done in the early morning before the heat and especially after a storm.
My favorites have been the baby ears, gentle whorls too small to be traced with a finger. Slipper shells lined up in a nursery waiting for Mardi Gras kings (found in the cake.) The pen shells are great, just begging to be fashioned into stately fish. Translucent jingles should be jewelry and coral strains and bursts to be appreciated. Thick fossilized quahogs cup olives just right for afternoon green tea. That’s some of our collection.
I’m not a beachcomber, but my brother and his wife are glassers. They really loved Sandy Hook New Jersey which is supposedly near an old glass factory: at any rate they took me there once and even I found around a dozen samples of seaglass (in addition to craploads of other anthropogenic sea-washed artifacts such as ceramic shards. Thankfully no needles!)
We have spent time on the Jersey Shore, on Antigua, on Cape Cod, Myrtle Beach, and best of all, Sanibel Island and Captiva Island in Florida, and have brought home many many many shells over the years. We have had countless jars filled with shells, and those glass based lamps with white pleated shades that you can fill with shells (or anything, really). On Sanibel Island our motel had a little shed out back where you could clean your finds, and boil a big shell to extricate the mollusk that lived inside (I don’t know if that’s still done, this was back in the 70’s).
Driving through Florida, we always stopped and bought more shells to pad out our collection at those ‘shell super-stores’ (forgot the name) that sold tons of shells from all over. My favorites were the big snowy white conches and smaller lacy looking whelks with the pink insides, and similar big clam shells (once ideal for ashtrays but now mostly used for displaying small items or candies). I love shells and beaches! I just got back from Jekyll Island, Georgia, and was disappointed there was such a dearth of shells there. A few tiny clamshells, or mussel shells, though we did pick up a handful of empty carapaces from small crabs.
Few shells, but we have a lot of rocks that we’ve picked up either because they’re agates or they just look cool. There’s one beach on the Oregon coast where there are layers and layers of exposed fossilized shell imprints that are easily collected.
It never occurred to me that this is a hobby, and that others enjoy it, too. I thought it was just something I did to motivate myself to get my butt off the couch.
I live in southern MN. But everywhere I go I always have my eye to the ground looking for the little creature dramas taking place and interesting natural items. I am not above taking things home and have a lot of natural oddities around the house.
I’ve looked for shells in WA, OR, FLA, and CA. And I spend time in the winter on a beach in Mexico. The shelling there isn’t particularly good because of a long reef which protects the beach.
I did pick up a fair-sized conch there but think the locals put it out to attract people to their beach club. The waiter said, “Here, let me hold onto that for you until you are ready to leave.” I said, “No, thanks.” The next day when I went by there was a new one there. Heh.
This winter I’m going to the northwest coast of Costa Rica where I hear the waves are good so maybe I’ll find something new.
There are no real standouts in my collection. Each one has a memory and a place associated with it. A lot of them end up around my fish pond. So when I sit out there in the summer I have a little travel biography to amuse me.
I wish I could remember. We saw an otter family at that same beach. It’s one of the smaller locations to stop on the Oregon coast, near a bridge that spans a creek gulch. Maybe my wife can come up with the name.
Had no clue what the OP is referring to. We call it beach combing, or - when combined with looking at hermit crabs, anemones and the like- tide pooling.
I like beachcombing - I live on the south coast of England - the beaches here are pretty much all flint shingle from gravel to cobble size (varying by location).
The shells here are pretty ordinary (to me now anyway) - whelks, cockles, mussels, limpets, various clams, winkles, - and foreign invaders: slipper limpets, cherrystone clams.
But it’s also good here for fossil urchins, sponges and shark teeth, plus some of the flint pebbles are really interesting - I’ve got one that looks like a Nazca skull and a quartz geode that was naturally split open to look like the eggs from Alien.
Some of the beaches here have quite a lot of history too - so I can find seaglass from quite old bottles (in Southampton Water, I like to imagine that it just might be from a champagne bottle tossed overboard from the maiden voyage of the Titanic) - also bits of worn vintage tile and pottery - very occasionally, silver coins and bits of vintage maritime stuff such as clay pipe stems or corroded brass buckles.
I got a lot more responses than I thought I would! Thanks guys! Tonight I’ll take a picture of my whole collection and post it here! Why don’t you guys do the same?
You know, you can shell with a beer in your hand and a buzz in your head, right? I’ve been known to have a few cocktails, toke up, and then go look for shells. I don’t think partying and shelling are necessarily mutually exclusive. Shelling is just one of the things I might do when I’m at the beach. I might also get completely hammered and never leave my beach chair. I might go swimming. I might go looking for dolphins. I will usually participate in that day’s beach bocci tournament, the competition for which is deadly serious. I don’t collect shells like some people collect coins or stamps, but if I see a cool one, I’ll pick it up and take it home.
I don’t… I can’t… They’re scattered all over my house. I do not have all the shells in one place. There’s probably a handful of olives in every beach bag I own that haven’t made it out yet.
Maybe if I think about it, I’ll get a pic of that huge whelk for you.
I live above a small beach south of Seattle, WA. It’s pretty rocky and the beach is covered with shell “crumbs” after they’ve been pounded against the rocks by the water, but I do find whole shells a lot of times, too. I don’t really have any favorites-a nice example of any shell makes me happy. Mostly what we get are clam, scallop, razor clam and fancy snail shells. I also collect small, interesting pieces of wood. I have this idea that I’m going to glue them all together and make a sculpture type thing for our entry. I saw it on HGTV once and though it was a great excuse to keep collecting. 
