UncleBill, that’s a cool story.
After a major storm along the Delaware coast a couple years ago, I found an enormous beached sea turtle. It was dead. It was maybe 8-9 feet long.
I found a guy getting a hummer from his girlfriend. I was just walking down the empty beach, not really paying attention, and apparently he wasn’t either. I looked up at one point and they were maybe 20’ to my left; he was on his back on a towel and she, well, had her head down.
I didn’t try to find their owner.
Live starfish and jellyfish in tidal pools at St. Augustine, FL after a storm. Lots of cool shells that I have made into jewelry.
Sea glass in various colors (blue is the rarest). A fossil of some kind of nautilus type animal–it’s mostly covered by the rock it was embedded in, but you can tell what it is. Some shells, although this area isn’t the best as far as shells go. My daughter found child’s gold ID bracelet.
The oddest things I’ve found on a beach were these weird grey…gaskets. At the time, I was all indignant about irresponsible boaters tossing their crap overboard.
After I got a beachcombing guidebook for Christmas, I discovered they were egg cases of the Lewis’ Moon Snails that I have been collecting. :o
Marcie and I were married on a beach on Sanibel Island, FL. Sort of a tribute to our hippie years.
I had a one quart jar filled with fossilized shark teeth; they were found on Venice Beach, FL. Took multiple weekends to find that many; they used to be very common at that particular beach.
One time at Ocean Beach in San Francisco I found a little film can full of really good weed. At least I thought so.
Did the rubber duckies ever come ashore in Britain? That would be one lucky beachcomber.
The first thing to come to mind: A perfectly round pebble, about the size of a large olive. Wonderful to roll around in the palm of my hand and in between my fingers.
And just remember: the beach is a place where a man can feel he’s the only soul in the world that’s real. (I guess that goes for women, too)
I didn’t find this, but in Maine this summer a native of the state showed us a beach lightning strike–it was an oddly shaped chunk of grey-black glass with some sand and tiny pebbles stuck on its surface in some places. When you examined it closely you could find one indentation where it sort of looked like someone had tried to insert a screw. That was the exact spot of the strike, of course, and the heat of the lightning had made the chunk of glass out of the beach sand.
That is so cool! I hope they manage to find its story!
I’ve never found anything on the beach, but I did find a Polaroid photo of some random black guy sitting on a chair against a white wall on a friend’s lawn. There were no neighbour’s houses for quite some distance, so we don’t really know where it came from.
When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and I to Maine with a few of our friends. It was right after a storm, so there was a ton of debris washed up. It was also off-season and the water was cold. We were walking the beach, and I spotted a twenty sticking out of a pile of seaweed. Then my friend found a five. Pretty soon we were out in the surf picking out American and Canadian bills. We got around $120 between us, which we promptly spent on penny candy and salt water taffy at the Goldenrod in York.
Lucky you! I live a few blocks from Ocean Beach - I should check it out 
Joe
Hey! This thread prompted me to finally start a GQ thread tommorow about the weird things I found on the beach a couple weeks ago. Definitely what you found too, so I don’t need to now. But seriously, those things are organic? I picked them up, and they look and feel like rubber so I thought they were litter too. They even have a grain on them like a little kid’s football. And they’re huge! For reference my hand’s 6" from wrist to the tip of my index finger.
Other things found at the beach: several types of crabs both living and dead, small egg cases, a live horseshoe crab, scores of sand dollars and once even a live one, assorted shells, and a dead thing that looked like a small sand shark that was maybe 2’ long.
Being a native New Englander, I must say that is the arguably the best possible way to spend such a windfall if you’re underage. I brought two boxes of GR taffy mix with me when I went to Turkey last year just to remind me of home.
I haven’t found any real nifty treasure on the beaches, but I did run across a seagull trailing what were clearly his intestines. Needless to say he was not in any condition to flee so I got a good look (no, I didn’t touch) and it made me wonder if the Alka-Seltzer dealie isn’t entirely an urban myth.
I’m going to hazard a guess that it could be a sea robin skeleton. I’ve seen them llook quite like that but with a bit more flesh on them and easier to identify. Very common in NJ, when you hook them and bring them in, they bark or croak out of the water. Disturbing the first time you hear fish vocalizing.
It’s quite likely he was attacked by something…what was the location?
I’ve found a few bits of sea glass and some really cool sea-worn rocks in Maine. One of the “rocks” actually appears to be a small piece of brick. I’ve never found much besides shells in North Carolina. My mom found some small conch shells at a beach in South Carolina.
Coast of New Hampshire, possibly extreme southern Maine (south of York) - it was 1996 so I don’t remember exactly. I do remember quite clearly he wasn’t otherwise visibly injured. I wouldn’t rule anything out 'cause I’m no ornithologist, but seeing a seagull with his guts hanging out, first thing that crossed my mind was “Alka-Seltzer”.
Whenever I am in Barbados I pick up a dozen or so pieces of sea glass, mostly red and green, sometimes colorless. Two winters ago, I was doing laps around an area marked off by balloons (to keep boats off) and I saw what I took to be a small bottle cap bobbing in the ocean. I grabbed it and discovered it was not a cap but a small container (maybe an inch or a bit more across and 1/4 inch high. When I got back to the beach, I opened it and it was bone dry inside. It was empty so I don’t know what it was supposed to be for (someone suggested contact lenses). For a couple years I had been looking for a small container to hold pills in my pocket in case I am out when I am supposed to take a pill (one of many small items that seem to have disappeared from stores) and, after I cleaned this up, I have been using it as pillbox ever since.
Once in Miami Beach one winter, the beach was littered by jellyfish. I didn’t go swimming. Last week in Myrtle Beach I saw a horseshoe turtle shell. In the same place I saw dozens of beachcombers (using metal detectors), but not once did I see any of the them pick anything up.
I don’t know if this counts, but once in Barbados I saw a woman standing in the ocean talking on a cell phone. Twenty minutes later, returning from a walk she was still there yakking away. I guess it is a good place not to be bugged!
A couple of very large, very dead, very swollen seals? I can’t say exactly what they were as I was not anxious to examine them closely.
Of course, my BF of the time took photos.
So it wasn’t a visible wound, then…more like the guts hanging out the cloaca? (In case you were wondering, I was thinking of that series of pictures that keeps making the rounds showing a seagull after being attacked by a hawk or something.)
I’ve found lots of seaglass, a good number of fossils, shells of course, interesting driftwood, bits of boat flotsam and quite a number of lost gloves - like this one, for example.
On the shores of Portsmouth Harbour, I’ve found various bits of old stuff - including a section of a clay pipe stem and a silver sixpence
