Beachcombing St. Croix

You may not know this but Katie has a mutant gene that causes her to go stark-raving-mad about finding the discarded calcium deposits of departed sea life. In short, she loves to find shells. This is a typical position for Beachcomber Katie.

And here is a beautiful shot she took of a lot of the small shells she found.
She was also really into collecting sea urchins. When alive, these guys are about the meanest nastiest little things you'd ever mess with. I'll post some underwater pictures of living sea urchins later. Their spines are long, sharp and very poisonous. But once they're dead they have a nice little bumpy shape.

We also came across these lovely conch shells on the beach. They are a little beat up but that's what you get when you don't go out harvesting the poor guys. Harvesting is when they go out into the grassy bottomed areas and find ones with creatures still in them. They remove the creatures, sometimes they eat them and then sell the shells. We felt we didn't want to support the harvesting so we didn't buy any of those. But shells that wash up on the beach are fair game in my book.

I got really fascinated with sea glass. These are fragments of bottles and other bits of glass that have gotten tumbled around so much in the surf that they get this nice rounded opaque look to it. The green bits were the easiest to spot because they stood out so nicely against the brown and white sand.