The Essential Beachcomber

A honey hole (or honeyhole ) is slang for a location that yields a valued commodity or resource. A local landmark or road near a honey hole may have "Honey Hole" in its name .    In fishing , a honey hole could be a particular spot in a body of water (or used as a general term for the entire body of water) where conditions are ideal for catching fish. In popular culture , American Pickers , a documentary reality television series where the stars often refer to some "picks" as honey holes because of the amount of amazing objects they contain.                        ( From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) I love daylight savings time!  The long dark early evenings of winter are over (well the Florida winter never really started but the dark is gone here in SWFL)  The sun now sets at 7:45pm instead of the earlier 6pm of the "fall back" pre-daylight savings time .  I am a "spring ahead" girl for sure.  Those extra few hours of daylig

Just off the top of my head I can think of some really good reasons to get up early to watch the sunrise... 1 )   Alone time because the hubby is still sleeping.  2 ) The world is quiet & still.  3 ) An early start gives me more productive time during the day. Yup, I could give you lots of reasons to crawl out of bed for the sunrise. Maybe even millions of reasons. As the thunderstorm rolled across SWFL late last night, I knew I would wake up before dawn to see what had rolled in. No need for an alarm clock or wake up app. Just to sit on the beach and watch it wake up is reason enough.

Asking an avid sheller where they found their overflowing bucket of shelling treasures is like asking a  fisherman where he fishes to catch the big ones. The reply to your pointed question is usually answered in a mumbled garbled vague  sort of way. You'll never get specifics and you will definitely get their best poker face.  Most serious shellers will share their favorite shelling spots but don't think for a moment there aren't a few left in the vault for safe-keeping.  A few years back I started seeing some very interesting pictures being posted from the Bonita Springs area on the iLove Shelling Facebook page.   This beach chick was posting pictures of huge horse conchs & stunning alphabet cones, the likes of which I hadn't seen for a while even on Sanibel. She wasn't giving up too many details either but did elude to a tennis court by some beach condo & she always called it "the 10 spot".  So I did what any self-respecting beach combing l

Tuesday on Manasota Key was a sheller's delight.  The week-end NW winds had finally produced some shells. The strong winds over the week-end had my hopes up for some shell action but as of late Sunday nothing was happening. Today was like any other week day for me - haircut at 11, bank errand in the next town over, wash truck, bank errand in my town, class at 3 and all it took was one phone call to bring it all to a screeching halt.  My cell phone rings (well actually a guitar strums because there is no banjo on my ring selection) and it's my mom. "Your cousin just called and said you asked her to give you a heads up if there was a shell pile on the beach - well there is and she said you should get out there quick".   I don't know if I was happier about the shell pile or having a cousin that takes a good shell pile as seriously as I do but at any rate I mentally rearranged my afternoon schedule as I sat in the car while the car wash-thingy cleaned off th