The Essential Beachcomber

The day breaks revealing a busy morning of shelling at Blind Pass on Sanibel/Captiva. Can you remember being a kid and playing a game of  hide & go seek?  The best hiding place was always a closet.  As you sat in the closet being quiet and trying not to be found did you ever try to see your hand in front of your face?  That is dark.  If you are at Blind Pass on Sanibel/Captiva at 5am it's called "pitch black".  The 5:45am lowest minus tide of 2013 coincided with a new moon which means no moon - no light at all except for the hundred's of thousands of incandescent stars glowing across the sky.  As we stood in the empty parking lot of Turner Beach g earing up for our shelling expedition on the beach below our eyes slow ly became accustomed to the early morning pre-dawn sky and the outlines of shell pil es started coming into view .   My strategy for being the first one on the early morning  beach is to do a quick scan the...

Low tide at Little Hickory uncovers the entire cove. Just as important as the Where to shell would be the When to shell.  There are lots of really fabulous beaches in SWFL that will produce plenty of decent shelling finds whether it is hot or cold - sunny or rainy - windy or calm but if a high tide has the shoreline covered in water the chances of you finding a bonanza of shell goodies are greatly decreased.  Learning to determine the tide activity can greatly increase your shelling success.  Tides aren't just waves lapping up against the shore. Tides are the daily rise and fall of the ocean surface.   A very simple way to understand the flow of the tides is that the tide comes in (high tide) and the tide goes out (low tide).  In a tidal day there are usually 4 tides - in - out - in - out but depending on the time of the year there might only be two tides in a day. Tides vary in a pattern over the course of the seasons.  The moon phase effects th...