Once Upon a Time, I Was a Professional Beachcomber! Part 1 — The Beginning

Yes, such a thing really is possible. But to explain the workings of how I got into such a situation we need to go into a little bit of background first.

This is part one of the story, which I decided needed telling, just for the record.

When I was a little kid — maybe 5,6 or 7 — we used to spend a lot of time in the south of France because my dad had work there. I'm not talking about we would just go for a few weeks, I'm talking about we would rent a house and we would live there for two to six month long stretches at a time.

We were by the coast, and from time to time (when it was nice) we would go to the beach. There was a stretch of beach my parents liked — which back then was pretty deserted — between the towns of Juan les Pins and Golfe Juan. At some earlier point I guess it was frequented by lots of people who, to some degree, would throw their garbage there... including glass.

Anyway I was fascinated by the fact that I could crawl around in the sand and find what I came to think of as "the little blue stones." The little blue stones were actually tiny pieces of cobalt blue sea glass that most likely had originated from various ointment bottles that people (dating back to the early 1900s) had taken to the beach to put on as suntan oil and whatever else.

Yours truly on the beach, as a little kid. Scanned from an old photo.

Anyway, this early fascination with beach glass turned into something I subsequently pursued pretty much in all the places I have lived since then... Denmark, Spain, France as mentioned, the UK, and a few others.

Of course it was never more than a bit of a hobby and amounted to pretty much my own equivalent of what people do when they go on vacations at a beach resort and they bring home rocks and shells, except I would bring home a little handful of sea glass.

That all changed in 2006 when I moved to Port Townsend, Washington.

During the first days I was here I actually lived at a campground in a State Park, because I had no house to come to and no place to live and on a daily basis I would walk on the beach — just as a meditation, and as an enjoyment of the fact that I was finally by the ocean again after living for 25 years in Texas rather far from the water.

As I did my daily walks I noticed that there was quite a bit of sea glass in this area which made me very happy so I started picking it up because it was something I'd been doing for a good 40 years, at that point... and it was one of my favorite pastimes.

Now here's where it gets a little bit cosmic and woo-woo.

I've often enjoyed being on the beach and walking on the beach as a sort of walking meditation, and that certainly was also the case here. I would walk along quietly and take in the sounds and the scents of the ocean and as I did, I would think to myself "wouldn't it be amazing if I could actually find a way to make a living, just from walking on the beach."

You see, at the time I didn't have any idea what my job was going to be in Port Townsend... I didn't arrive here for a job; most likely I figured I would continue earning my way (as best I could) being a stamp dealer for collectors and being a book editor and occasional technical writer.

As the days became weeks and the weeks became months I roamed further and further out along the beach and discovered that if you were willing to walk two or three miles (or longer, each way) you would actually get to a part of the beach where you could find more than just some occasional sea glass. In fact it was plentiful and not only was it plentiful, but it included many very interesting and unique colors I'd never seen before.

On one of my lot walks I learned from a local lady that the reason there was so much sea glass, as well as old pottery and copper, and other bits of metal was that further down, at the top of the great 300-400 foot slopes facing the beach had been a garbage dump that served three local towns from the 1800s until the late 1950s... and all they did was take all the garbage that came in on trucks and bulldoze it over the edge of the cliffs and let the ocean tides wash it away.

Clearly this was long before there was any kind of environmental protection or environmental laws about what you could do with waste!

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that for a period of some 60-70 years, the glass waste and other things that couldn't be burned had been thrown in the ocean and slowly been worked and polished by the currents and the sand and the rocks and the waves and so there was lots and lots of sea glass.

Now, let's put a bookmark in that for a moment and remember that at this early point I was just delighted to be able to find interesting sea glass but I didn't have any idea that I was going to do anything with it period until, one day I found myself at a street fair where I got to talking with a lady who actually made jewelry using sea glass.

As part of talking to her I also discovered that she didn't actually do very much beachcombing on her own, instead she chose to buy the sea glass — to get exactly what she needed — through eBay.

She explained to me that whereas she liked beachcombing and didn't mind going out there... but in terms of effectiveness she would much rather be in the studio making jewelry than spending hours and hours trying to find something that she wouldn't necessarily find because beachcombing is basically a crapshoot, and so she would rather go online where there were sellers who could sell her precisely what she wanted in the colors and sizes she needed, rather than rely on luck.

And that, is how my idea of actually "getting paid to walk on the beach" came to fruition!

And this is a natural break point in the story, so I'll stop today's installment here. Stay tuned for additional chapters during the coming weeks!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2025.07.07 01:32 PDT
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