I never find anything on the beaches I go to…alive or dead…except people. Even seashells are sparse. However, this summer, a stingray swam between us in maybe 1.5 ft of water while walking into the waves with my daughter at Hilton Head. And, we found a live star fish caught in the tide at York Beach, ME. There were also a few small, dead crabs and the remains of claws from, what I assume, were large crabs (or lobster?).
I should add…my friend was at a NJ beach a few summers ago when a mother and baby calf beached themselves!
So, what have you found on the beach? Sea glass? Sharks teeth? This question presumes you were not fishing nor mining for lost goodies on the beaches. However, I’d be curious to hear of your unusual tales, regardless.
Well our backyard is a beach, then a rock jetty then more beach. There is a dock out there too. Some notable cool things we have found on the beach:
I walked on the the northern strand of beach a few autumns ago and I noticed little red, green, and yellow balls all over the beach [the beach is about 1/2 mile long]. Thousands of them…I wondered what they were so I went to investigate. To my surprise the first cluster of small balls I came up to I noticed they were not balls at all, they were peppers. Yep, yellow, red, and green peppers, thousands of them stretching the entire length of the beach. I figured a tanker out in Long Island Sound must have dropped a huge pallet full of them and they floated to the beach…I wish I had a camera, it was a cool site. No need to clean them up either, once the seagulls realized they could eat them, they spent the next day and a half gorging on peppers.
Again, on the same beach, I was walking and saw a large “thing” washing up in the waves, it was a HUGE piece of rope. NOw when I say huge, I mean gigantic. I could barely lift the huge line with my own strength so I decided to go get my little john deer lawn tractor and drag it out of the water. When I finally hauled the entire thing out it was 400 feet long It’s now the border around our garden…
We had a large tree wash up on the beach a few years ago, it caught up on the jetty after one storm and just remained there. It stayed for almost two years, it lost all it’s bark and become a huge piece of drift wood. The local teens carved their amorous names into it and finally last year a storm broke it up and the sea retook it’s bounty.
I took a school trip to Dauphin Island, AL and there was a dead dolphin on the beach. This was a biology class trip and the teacher began making inquiries as to whether it might be possible to obtain some pieces of the skeleton for her classroom. However, it disappeared after we’d been there two days.
Some people in Fort Morgan, AL found something interesting the wake of Hurricane Ike.
I found my ex-wife on the beach. I can’t say that experience eliminated my beachcombing, but it did cause me to proceed with more caution when I discover an interesting but unusual creature sprawled out on the sand.
I grew up in a beach town and picked up garbage whenever I was beachcombing. But last year my daughter found a huge sharks tooth on the beach at Fort Clinch State Park on Amelia Island. It was about 2.5 inches long.
Wait, we’re not playing a Feud game? Meh, my answers stand.
Once, when snorkelling, I found treasure. Shiny gold and silver pirate’s booty, right on the ocean floor. Two dimes, three quarters, and a Loonie, IIRC.
Probably the coolest thing I saw was two blue crabs mating. It was very romantic.
Ooh ah, I love playing ‘what is that’ on the beach.
Small piece of fossilized coral
Coconuts a LONG way from home
A perfect molt shell of a horseshoe crab. (hung it on wall for some years)
Complete un-cracked/chipped glass bottle from turn of 20th century paint company
Whole tacklebox full of lures, must have fallen off a boat, obviously been under water
When my brothers and I were kids we used to swim at a private beach, and one year my brother lost his full face dive mask either while swimming or on the beach. We found it the following year during low tide where it was buried with just a tiny corner of the yellow rubber still visible. The glass was scratched up pretty badly and the rubber was aged but we used it for years after.
I found an unusual, small piece of shell when I was a kid. It is a sort of loop that had been worn smooth and is shaped like a slightly squashed oval. I have been wearing it on a chain as a necklace off and on for about 25 years now. It’s unique, and I think it’s pretty. It’s my talisman.
When I was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Marines we were on an exercise on Onslow Beach at Camp LeJeune, NC, and I was walking along the beach and spotted a ring. It was a college ring from some school in Iowa, I think. It had either initials or a name inscribed inside it, and the graduation year on the top, of course, from the 1940s. This was before Al Gore invented the World Wide Web, so I looked up the college the old fashioned way, in a library, and sent them the ring with a note how I found it, hoping they could find the owner in their ancient records and get it to him.
A coupla weeks/months later I got a letter with a $20 bill in it. The owner of the ring had been in ROTC during the end WWII, and graduated after the war was ended, and went into the Marines as a 2nd Lieutenant. They were doing an amphibious exercise on Onslow Beach in the latter part of the 40’s, and since he had lost weight in the Marines, his ring slipped off as they were getting onto a Higgins Boat extracting from the beach. He stopped and tried to go back after it, but some combat grizzled Sgt grabbed him and hauled him into the boat and they were off. He said that loss really affected him, and he never wore another ring after that one. He told me to spend that $20 on beer, which I did.
On a deserted beach near Javea, Spain: a sterling silver bangle bracelet
Near the bay at Port St Joe, north Florida: large dead sea turtle, numerous live starfish, which I threw back, and, in late April, mating blue crabs, which I studiously avoided
From beaches all over the place: conch and other types of shells, sea glass, and lots and lots of garbage, especially cigarette butts
Twice, when I used to go the Rockaways (New York City) in the 1970s: stolen cars, partially sunk into the sand. They would make for awesome beach glass if only they were left there.
Once, in New Jersey in the 1980s: thousands and thousands of beach whistles. To Jersey’s credit, I don’t think this has happened for a while.
Not “found,” exactly, but once when swimming in the very cold Pacific off San Francisco I was temporarily befriended by a seal.
One of the most exciting things I found as a kid was an intact barrel bobbing close to the shore. We could not help ourselves and had to drag it ashore and punch it open to see what treasures lay inside it - to our horror, but the seagulls glee, it was full of rotting herring. It only took two seconds from we cracked it open to the green stench filled the beach and we were swarmed by seagulls. The smell was so nauseating that we could not even run away, we had to crawl away while the seagulls were fighting amongst themselves.
The next summer we found a huge seal washed ashore lying on the beach with a bulging belly. But did we learn from the above experience???
My aunt lived on the Washington coast and I visited frequently. The most unusual thing was a Russian soap bottle that was half full of vodka. Likely a Russian sailor snuck it on board a ship and tossed it when he was going to get caught with it. A couple cousins and I drank the vodka, it wasn’t a very good brand. My most prized find and I still have is a large Japanese glass float. It was about 2 feet in diameter and was made from yellow glass, a very rare color for these floats. My aunt and uncle had a couple hundred of the glass float for yard decor till about 20 years ago when tourists started stealing them. The same thing happened to lots of folks so now you rarely see the glass float being used for decor anymore.
The day at the beach I would like to forget happened when I was in the Navy and stationed in San Diego. My first wife, my son and I went to Coronado beach for the day. My son, then about 18 months old, wandered around picking up colored bits of plastic off the beach and soon filled up his plastic bucket. He came back and showed us what he found. Tampon applicators. We found out from the locals that Ensenada, which was about 5 miles south across the border, pumps it’s sewage into the ocean. The women there flush the applicators instead of throwing them in the trash.
I have been beachcombing for years 9sandwich, MA). Nothing except for the usual dead fish, bits of rope and netting, and lots of placstic bits. Not once (n >25 years) have I found anything of value.:mad:
I found a men’s wedding ring once while snorkeling of Poipu on Kauai, Hawaii. I called the cops when I got back to my hotel room, and they sent an officer over to collect it. I don’t know what happened from there, but I hope that whoever lost it got it back.
We’ve been to several beaches this summer and found some cool stuff, but this skeleton in Beverly Beach, MD has me completely stumped. My daughter said it looks like a dragon skeleton. Cool find, whatever it is.
It’s now the border around our garden…