Best Florida Beaches for Shelling

Here’s an update on my favorite beach for shelling, Shell Key. Its been a while since I’ve been to any beach to collect seashells so my boyfriend, David, and I went to Shell Key for my birthday. We collected almost 3 five gallon buckets of shells!

There weren’t as many sand dollars as last time, but we found about a dozen. There were lots of surf clams, scallops, venuses, arks, cockles and more. Check out the picture of all the shells after they were sorted.

The most exciting part of our day trip was right before the ferry came to pick us up. David was looking for sand dollars in the water. I heard him yell something so I walked over to see if he was finding anything good. He showed me a handful of our favorite shells, Lettered Olives. And they were the biggest ones I had ever seen, measuring in at about 3 inches long! He said that the water kept washing them up and he could barely catch them all. We collected about 30 and then decided to walk closer to where we would be picked up by the ferry.

A boat had docked and there was a man standing next to it. Right next to his foot was a large Lightning Whelk in perfect condition. I ran up and asked, “Is that your shell?”

He said, “No, you can have it.”

As I picked it up, it seemed heavier than what it should be and I knew it was still alive. I don’t take live shells from the beach, but I had David take some pictures before I threw it back.

I was reminded of two things that day.

1. Shelling is better in the winter months (although, 3 buckets of shells isn’t bad!)

2. Always reapply sunscreen!! Sunburns are not something you want to take home.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.