Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Beach Treasures



During our week at the cottage on Lake Erie I of course knew that we were picking up a few choice finds on the beach every day but it wasn't until we got home and spread everything out on the dining room table that I realized just how big our collection had grown.


Here are the 26 lucky stones that we found:




My favorite thing to collect ended up being beach glass. I had no idea that Lake Erie was belching out these bits of water-tumbled, water-smoothed remnants of human civilization before I discovered them for myself last month. I still can't quite fathom the vast quantities involved. We collected some 700 pieces in all.

The most common color was white/frosted:



Our collection of white glass ended up weighing nearly 2 pounds. Given that Lake Erie's coastline is about 850 miles and our beach was no more than 1/100th of a mile in breadth, I estimate that some 170,000 pounds of white beach glass a week may be washing up (850 x 100 x 2). That's a lot of glass!


Of course we found other colors, too. Brown and green were fairly common.




And then there were the pieces of porcelain:




The few pieces of blue beach glass that I found were my favorites.




Here are some of the other pieces that I liked:




And then there were the oddities. (Correctly identify them all and win a penny!)




If the inflatable kiddie pool I had 50 years ago had been spiced with items half as interesting as these I might have played in it a lot more often....

2 comments:

  1. Wow! You really ARE a beachcomber! I'm very impressed with your beautiful (and unusual, looking at that last pic) coolection (I'm leaving that typo) of beach glass, etc. Deep blue glass is always a favorite, but I also like how the colors in that third picture morph into each other. And the whites are so pearlescent... the large quantity you found is so startling, and makes me wonder what sort of containers were made of that color? And how did they end up in the lake? Likewise, with the bits of antique dinnerware. (I like the hints of pattern you can see.) I'm saving my speculations on IDing those last tidbits until I can commune with my extraterrestrial penpal... ;-)

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  2. Like April, I like finding blue beach glass best.
    As for the identifying the oddities, I think I see a piece of chalk, a marble, a bent nail and a fossilized condom.
    You can keep my penny.

    Oh. I should add the captcha is inito, which seemed a lot like finito to me.
    And my "Comment as:" name comes from the red highlighted display I got when I accidentally click on Post Comment before a comment. It said, "Comment should not be empty." I'm glad this refuge from OD does not allow that OD quirk of empty comments.
    I'll stop now.

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