Okay, let's try this again. Last night's blog about searching for beach glass resulted in disaster. Between trying to get a couple crafts prepped and my 4 yo waking up crying from a nightmare and the blog was supposed to be saved for proof-reading.
Now let's try to make sense of it all...


On another note, a few months ago I did a Beach Glass 101 blog and later had an article published on the internet about beach glass. Last weekend, during the New moon, the moon was at it's closest point to earth during the month and the tides were extremely strong. The moon caused the tides to push the waves farther up the beach during high tide than usual and pulled the water back much farther than usual during low tide. The result was a great deal of ocean debris was left behind for those willing to search through the piles of shell fragments, while braving the very cold mornings and windy, chilly afternoons. I went with my 2 sons in the afternoon on Weds and we found the beaches filled with fisherman, trying to land a large striper bass (this is close to the end of the striper bass run and the area's contests are coming to a close) We found the beach littered with shells and shell fragments (not to mention the garbage left behind by a few fisherman who obviously don't care much about the environment... hopefully they wasted their time on the beach and caught nothing but colds...LOL) but we found only a couple pieces of beach glass worth keeping. We arrived too late for low tide and probably to late in the afternoon, as it was tough to spot beach glass with the sun going down. I returned by myself on Saturday, the day of the New Moon, and went to my secret spot which has yielded some rare colors in the past and hoped to have more luck. It started off slowly, as the beach where a couple of beautiful gems were found this past Sept was totally void of beach glass. I continued to the North and came up with very little luck, only a couple of common browns and they weren't even very nice. For some reason I turned to the South and doubled-back and I found huge deposits of shells with beach glass mixed in. There wasn't anything special about these pieces, as they were mostly browns, with a couple of nice greens mixed in along with the occasional whites. A few pieces were really chunky and well-rounded, with a couple pieces being jewelry quality. I also found a few very nice shells that were intact and not often found on the beach in this condition, along with a small piece of Amethyst beach glass. In all, about 30-35 pieces that were worth taking home and I only covered 2 or 3 blocks worth of beach in 2 hours. The ocean debris was that dense!
The entire family came back with me Saturday afternoon, but we went to another spot and again found little worth keeping, before heading back to my secret spot. I spent most of the time trying out my new camera and taking some of the beach glass jewelry pieces you see in my Etsy mini to the right, while my sweetie and the boys looked for beach glass (well the boys spent much time playing with someone's dog that was out for a stroll w/ her owner) We only had a very small handful on keepers, mostly browns again. Saturday night the moon looked HUGE in the sky and I hoped for a better Sunday.
Because Saturday morning was so bitterly cold, I waited until about 10am to hit my favorite spot... again.The New Moon didn't disappoint me and I travelled over the same few blocks I covered the day before and this morning's beachcombing prove fruitful again...I found a decent number of greens, browns and whites, along with 2 chunky pieces of Cobalt Blue and both pieces were found within a block of where I found my 1st two pieces of Cobalt earlier this summer! A stroll along the edge of the ocean on the way back, just as the tides were receding (much further out than I can ever recall seeing) turned up a couple more chunky browns and 3 large pieces...2 partial bottle necks and a large brown piece that is "L" shaped and very thick. One of the pieces is a white-ish, green-ish piece that may have been a coke bottle, the other was a green bottle neck piece. So, in addition to some more cool shells, a few of which will possibly be used in a jewelry piece, I added the 3 large pieces and 26 smaller for the day... and all in the same 2 or 3 blocks that I searched for about 2 hours the day before!!
I can't wait for the Moon to help my beachcombing again!!