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Why I Shell
Every morning I am on the beach before the sun is, with a mesh bag, a little plastic scoop, my old canvas hat and a
thermos of coffee I usually forget to drink. I have done this nearly every day since my husband Ed and I moved to Sanibel
for good in the fall of 1991, and before that on every vacation we ever took here, going back to 1974. Ed passed in 1997.
I still go. The beach is a good place to think about somebody.
People ask what the point is. There are jars of shells on every windowsill in this house and boxes of them in the
closet and I give bags of them to every grandchild who visits. The point is not the shells. The point is that for an hour
every morning I am walking slowly, looking carefully, at the exact place where the sea leaves things for you. What you
find is a bonus. What you notice is the reason.
Sanibel is a special place for this and it isn't just island pride. Most of Florida's barrier islands run north and
south, along the coast. Sanibel bends and runs east and west, sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico like a scoop, and
the currents pile the shells up on our beaches instead of carrying them past. That is why people come from all over
the world to walk our beach bent over.
When to Go: Tides, Storms and the Winter Wind
Low tide. That is the whole secret, and the rest is detail. The lower the water, the more of the beach is
uncovered, and the shells that were rolling around out in the surf are sitting there waiting. I keep the tide table
from the newspaper taped inside my kitchen cabinet and I plan my life around it. The lowest lows come around the new moon
and the full moon; those are the mornings I set the alarm.
After a storm, or after a good blow. A day or two after rough weather the beach is a different beach. The waves
have dug up everything and heaped it in long windrows along the tide line. In winter, when a cold front comes through and
the wind swings around to the northwest and blows hard for a day, the shelling the morning after can be the best of the
year. You will be cold. You will not care.
Early. The sun comes up, the shellers come out. In January and February, which is our busy season, the good
spots have a crowd by eight. If you are there when it is still gray you'll have the tide line to yourself, and the
birds, who are the only company I need.
Where. All of Sanibel's Gulf beach is good; it changes from week to week and everyone has a favorite. The
lighthouse end catches a lot. Bowman's Beach is a long walk and worth it. Blind Pass, up at the Captiva end, is where the
water moves fastest and the surprises turn up. I won't tell you which one is mine.
The Sanibel Stoop
You will hear this phrase the first day you are here. It is the posture of a person walking the tide line bent over
at the waist, eyes on the sand, and on a good morning the whole beach is doing it, like a field of herons. Everyone
laughs about the Sanibel Stoop and everyone has it. My doctor says my back would be better if I used a scoop on a
handle. I have the scoop. I still stoop. The scoop is for when I've already seen something.
A word about the mesh bag: get one. A plastic grocery bag holds water and sand and everything ends up a wet lump.
A mesh bag drains as you walk, so you carry shells and not the Gulf of Mexico.
Knowing Your Shells: The Ones You'll Find First
There are hundreds of kinds of shells on this island and the shell museum on Sanibel-Captiva Road will show you all of
them, beautifully. These are the ones you will fill your first bag with, and how to tell them apart.
| Lightning Whelk |
The big, handsome spiral with the long spout. Here is the thing to know: hold it with the point up and the opening toward you, and the opening is on the left. Almost every other spiral shell in the world opens on the right. The lightning whelk is a left-handed shell, and once you know that you'll never confuse it with anything. Young ones have brown streaks like lightning down the sides, which is where the name comes from. They get big, some of them as long as your forearm, though those are rare on the beach. |
| Lettered Olive |
A smooth, glossy, cylinder-shaped shell, tan or gray, about the size of your thumb, with fine brown zigzag markings that people say look like writing. The animal that lives in it keeps the shell polished, so a fresh one looks like it has already been oiled. They plow along just under the sand at the water's edge; you'll sometimes see the little trail. |
| Coquina |
The tiny clams, no bigger than a fingernail, in every color you can think of: yellow, pink, purple, striped, plain. You'll find them by the thousands right at the wash of the waves, and when a wave pulls back they dig themselves under in a second. When you find both halves still hinged and opened flat they look like little butterflies. Old-timers here made a broth from them. I make a windowsill of them. |
| Florida Fighting Conch |
Heavy, thick, orange-brown to dark brown, with a row of blunt knobs around the shoulder and a flared lip. Very common; some mornings the tide line is nothing but fighting conchs. The name is a slander. They aren't fierce, they just kick along with a little claw-shaped foot in a way that startled somebody once. Very often the one you pick up is still occupied; see the next section. |
| Also in every bag: |
calico scallops (the fan-shaped ones, mottled), kitten's paws (small, ridged, they do look like a paw), shark eyes (the round moon snail with the "eye" on top), banded tulips, jingle shells (thin, shiny, they rattle in the bag), and sand dollars. A white sand dollar is fine to take. A brown or greenish one with fuzz on it is alive; set it back in the water. |
| The Junonia |
The prize. A cream-colored spindle shell, three to five inches long, covered in neat rows of squarish brown spots, and unlike everything else on this list it lives in deep water offshore. It only comes up on the beach when the sea has a reason to send it. Most shellers go years without one. Some go a lifetime. When you find one here, the island paper takes your picture, and I am not exaggerating. I found my first on March 3 of this year, after 25 years of looking. Read the log. |
Live Shells: Leave Them
This is the important part and I will say it plainly. A shell with an animal in it goes back in the water.
Every time. It is against the law on Sanibel now to take live shells, and it should be, but I want you to do it
because it's right, not because of the ordinance. The animal made that shell over years; it is not finished with it.
And a beach where the live ones are all carried off is a beach that stops making shells.
How to tell: turn the shell over and look in the opening. If there is anything soft in there, or a little trapdoor
(that's the operculum) closing off the hole, it's alive. Fighting conchs are alive more often than not. A sand dollar
that's brown and velvety is alive. A starfish is alive. A shell with a hermit crab in it belongs to the hermit crab.
Set them down gently in the water, not on dry sand, opening down.
And if you turn over a shell and something inside looks at you, that's your answer.
Cleaning Your Shells
Rinse the sand off in fresh water first, out on the porch, with an old colander. Then:
- For the dull, algae-covered ones: a bath of half water, half household bleach, for a few hours or overnight, in a bucket outdoors. Rinse very well. The bleach takes off the green scum and the brown skin some shells have. Don't leave them in for days; it will eat the color.
- For fragile, thin or glossy shells (olives, jingles, scallops): skip the bleach, or dilute it a great deal. Warm soapy water and an old toothbrush.
- For a whelk or conch that still has an old occupant: a few days in a bucket of water outdoors, changed daily, and then the toothbrush and a good deal of patience. My neighbor swears by burying them in the yard for a couple of weeks and letting the ants finish the job. I have done it. It works. Mark the spot.
- To bring back the shine: once they are clean and completely dry, a very little bit of mineral oil or baby oil rubbed in with a soft cloth. It makes them look the way they did wet. Don't use varnish; it looks like varnish.
Then set them out on a towel in the sun to dry, sort them into egg cartons by kind, and try not to let it take over the
dining room table. I have failed at that last part for eight years.
The 1999 Log
I keep a composition book on the kitchen counter and write in it when I come in. These are the mornings worth
copying out.
| Jan. 12 | Front came through in the night, northwest wind all day yesterday, 51 degrees this morning and I wore Ed's old windbreaker. The best windrow I've seen in two winters. Nine lightning whelks, all dead and clean, the biggest 7 inches. A banded tulip with all its color. Hands so cold I couldn't work the bag. |
| Feb. 2 | Full-moon low. Quiet, gray, a good tide. An alphabet cone, whole, which I don't find often. A visitor from Michigan asked me what I was looking for and I said "nothing in particular" and she thought that was very funny. It's true, though. |
| March 3 | The junonia. I want to write this down carefully. Blind Pass, 6:40 in the morning, tide going out, two days after a hard blow. It was lying in plain sight on the wet sand at the edge of the shell line, spots up, as if somebody had set it there. I stood and looked at it for a good while before I picked it up because I did not believe it. Four and a quarter inches, perfect lip, not a chip on it. Empty, thank heaven, or I would have had to put it back and I honestly don't know that I could have. I sat down on the sand and cried a little, and an older gentleman walking past with his dog stopped and asked if I was all right and I held it up and he said "Oh, my. Oh, my." He understood. Twenty-five years. Ed, I found one. |
| March 4 | Went back to the same spot as if there might be another. There wasn't. There was a good calico scallop. The junonia is on the mantel in a little glass dome my daughter sent up from Naples. The paper called. |
| March 6 | Shell Fair weekend. Went to look, not to enter. Some of the specimen collections took my breath away. Came home and rearranged the windowsills. |
| April 20 | Warm now. The winter people are going home and the beach is emptying out. Thirty-one lettered olives in one morning, all sizes, from a stretch near the lighthouse where the sand was full of their little furrows. Kept the six best. A live one I watched for ten minutes before it dug itself under. |
| June 9 | Sand dollars, dozens, all white and dead and perfect, lying in a band about ten feet wide. Took eleven for the grandchildren. Also four live ones, brown, which I moved back down to the water because the tide was leaving them. |
| July 27 | Too hot to stay out past seven. Nothing much. A kitten's paw, orange, which is my favorite color of them. Thunderheads building over the Gulf by eight. Summer is the off season for shelling and for people; that's fair. |
| Aug. 15 | Grandchildren here from Ohio for a week. Took them out at first light. The 6-year-old found a fighting conch, discovered it was alive, and personally escorted it back into the water with a speech. I have taught somebody something. |
| Sept. 21 | A few days of west wind and chop. Coquinas by the thousand, every color, and a lightning whelk that's the best shape of the year, even if it's not the biggest. Sat on the sand afterward and drank the coffee for once. The season is turning. The first front can't be far off. I'll set the alarm. |
If you find a junonia, write and tell me. I want to hear the whole story. If you don't, write anyway and tell me
about the morning; that's the part that lasts. There's a kind lady on the Maine coast who hunts
sea glass the way I hunt shells, and reading her page felt like meeting a
cousin.
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