Find Sea Glass, Collect Sea Glass, Beach Hunt!

Find Sea Glass: Features of a good beach. How do you find your "own" glass beach?

Look for:

1. A highly populated shoreline area now or in the past.
2. Bluffs or cliffs backing the beach.
3. A clear fetch of 25 miles. 

Why? For a beach to be an excellent source of good quality sea glass, you will need to consider three factors:

• A source of glass
• Land features
• Waves                        

Without a good source of glass, a beach will be mediocre at best. At the same time, certain physical characteristics of a beach as well as waves affect the chances that you'll find sea glass of quality in decent quantities. Let's take a look a these importants areas.

Find Sea Glass - SOURCE OF GLASS

Ultimate best sources:

The best sources of glass are those where glass was used in various colors, in large quantities, and that were in existence over a long period of time. The very best sources of this type of glass were glass blowers' or glass makers' shops in years gone by. Those that were established close to a a beach have produced some notable "glass beaches."

On the other hand, such a source is very uncommon when compared to the relatively small number of glass manufacturers or glass blowers located near a beach. You might find one some day, some place...oooo, yes!

The most likely areas and your best bet to find sea glass:

Garbage dumps. Of course, these would be garbage dumps on or near a beach.

On beaches where there were dumps, there's quite a variety of types of glass. This is an important factor to a collector. Why? Because included are not only a large variety of bottles, but other items such as colorful dinnerware, glass lamps, chandeliers, et cetera, that were broken and discarded in the local dump.

Finding a dump site would be your best bet to identify in a search for your own seaglass beach. Go to a local historical museum or library to see what you can turn up.

Naturally, the best dump site would be a whole town site that had been/still is located next to a beach over a period of many decades or centuries.

Aside from the rare glass shop beaches mentioned above, the best beaches are old dump sites (see Land Features below for details about dumps).

General sources of lower yield:

Sites that were good for homesteads, camping, fishing, logging, and/or hunting that overlook a beach will produce a fair amount of decent sea glass.

This is true, for example, of Rosario Beach, shown on our video Sea Glass Saunter, which was inhabited by American Indians for many years right up into the 20th century.

Once again, a local historic library or museum would be a great place to start.

Among the less valuable sites would be:

Public beaches where folks go to picnic, swim, tip the bottle, or just party. The variety and the age of the glass diminishes quite a bit with this type of beach, but you will still find glass worth keeping if the beach has been popular for at least several decades.

Isolated beaches. Adventure!

Although these are great places for hiking and enjoying nature, isolated beaches are usually less productive. Glass on these beaches might come from bottles or hand-blown glass fish floats finding their way to the beach.

Note: Two other places to find sea glass that possibly would yield very interesting finds but probably in lower quantities would be 1) sites of shipwrecks or 2) beaches that lie along heavily used commercial seaways, such as the entrance to the St. Lawrence River seaway.

Since there are always exceptions, I'll add that some shipwreck areas could potentially produce a lot of sea glass. For example, rum-bottling ports/nearby beaches, rum-running islands and hideout areas would be an example.

From beaches along heavily-trafficked commercial lanes, glass would come from floating bottles tossed overboard with the garbage.

However, it's highly unlikely that any non-floating glass items dumped overboard would ever find their way to the beach.

Again, for finding these kinds of beaches, a local historical library or museum would be a great place to start your search.            

Find Sea Glass - LAND FEATURES

Once you have identified a good potential source for the glass, you need to look for certain physical characteristics that make up a good glass beach.

Excellent features: Imagine this scene. A town or highly populated camp has been located on high bluffs, perhaps wooded, overlooking the shore line. It's not built right on

the edge of the cliffs or bluff, but rather is situated 50-500 feet back from the edge of the bluffs. It's time to take the garbage out. There's no car or trash collection (that's true, children, there once was a time).

How far is hubby or child going to carry the trash? As short a distance as possible...but it has to be out of sight. Perfect! We're living on the bluffs. Pitch the trash over the bluff. Well, you can't see the shoreline from the cabin, can you? Glass on the beach.

Or what about the gullies formed by the rains? Extending back from the cliffs are gullies, a favorite for town dumps even in these modern times.

For a whole town, the garbage might go into one of the deeper gullies, or for a camp, into the smaller gullies or over the cliff. Along comes a torrent and we have glass washed down the gullies onto the beach.

Eventually, the rest of the trash (plastic didn't exist back then) decomposes and just the glass and ceramic or pottery shards are left. Bingo!

Even if the trash was dumped or buried in the back yard, it eventually ends up on the beach. Over the years, the wave action erodes away the cliff, the stuff on top falls down onto the beach, gets tumbled, and there's the glass.

An example is where I lived years ago in Santa Cruz, California. There, whole blocks of houses and roads have fallen into the surf line on East Cliff Drive.

Poor land features:

Land that stretches away fairly flat from the water is an indication that this may not be a good area to find sea glass.

Why? Well, let's say the source of glass was a dump, whether a large dump or one behind somebody's cabin. How would the glass get onto the beach? Unless it was deliberately carried or hauled (horse and cart)  to the beach and thrown onto it, it's very unlikely that there would be any way for the glass to migrate to the waterline. It would just sit where it was dumped and never make it to the beach. It would be difficult to find sea glass in this area.

So low-lying or flat land along a beach is an indication that it just will probably not be that great a beach to find sea glass in terms of quantity.

Another drawback to flat land is this: Streams, marshes, et cetera, in low-lying areas are slow moving, and, because the land is flat, much of the runoff water that gets to the ocean has deposited thick layers of sediment that may be many feet deep along the shoreline.

 Glass that is lying on top, instead of being there where you can find sea glass, can be buried many feet deep...if it even got onto the flat beach in the first place.

For the same reason, those beautiful, long sandy beaches that are so good for walking and enjoying nature may just not be very good for sea glass. The low land, lots of sand, and lack of the erosion effect on bluffs and cliff tend to bury the glass rather than to uncover it.

Find Sea Glass - WAVES

Without wave action to tumble the glass, it will never turn into beach glass. It will remain sharp edged and shiny with little change from a fresh shard.

On the other hand, too much wave action possibly could be bad. A lot of wave action tends to either bury the glass, drag it into deeper water, or scatter it over a larger area.

The exception to this might be rocky coastlines with indentations where the rocks, sand, and glass remain trapped in the coves in spite of continuous rough waves. Glass under these conditions does develop into highly-tumbled sea glass in a relatively-short time but may be broken up into smaller pieces than under other conditions.

Here is what you need to avoid as far as waves go:

Wave action that generally is less than about 1 foot high. It just does not produce sufficient tumbling to make well-rounded and frosted seaglass, even if the glass is very old. We have that problem along a portion of the beaches in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where the San Juan Islands and other islands and peninsulas block the ocean swells. You can find sea glass, but it's poorly tumbled and barely frosted

To reiterate, a certain amount of wave action is essential to produce quality sea glass.You need to take a look at the fetch (nautical term for the distance that wind can blow unobstructed over open water).

To produce the minimum 1-2 foot waves that are needed to tumble sea glass, the fetch usually needs to be a minimum of 25 miles. More is better.

Look at a map...or stand on the beach. Can you see any stretch of open water that extends in a straight line for more than 25 miles? If not, the chances are very poor that you'll find sea glass, at least well-tumbled, rounded, nicely-frosted sea glass.

A caveat: There are no hard and fast rules. These are good guidelines as a starting point. There are always exceptions to the above points.

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