The most enjoyable thing about beachcombing for glass floats is that it's a great excuse to spend time at the beach. On the Oregon and Washington coast beachcombing weather provides some of the most interesting experiences at the beach.
Typically, it's late winter or early spring, the weather has been stormy, but now it's clearing and the West winds are-a-blow'n. The waves are large and foamy, the sound of the ocean is often deafening this time of year. The sun breaks through the clouds only to be disturbed by an occasionally rain squall. The beach is deserted as you walk along the incoming tide, dodging waves, and watching the wind push mounds of foam up the beach. You look for the pockets of flotsam and jetsam that may contain a glass float hidden in it's midst. Often the sun is shining on the float making it look like a beautiful gem that's just appeared on the beach as a wave's retreated. This is what I've always loved about beachcombing.
The following stories are some of the experiences I and others have had beachcombing for glass floats. Read them and enjoy. If you would like to share an experience you've had, please let me know.
Classic Lucky Tourist Story (Karen Schneider)
I've know people that have lived at the coast for years and have never found a glass float, although they've always wanted to. Then they have friends come and stay that simply find floats strolling on the beach, sometimes not even knowing what they are. Here's one of these stories from Karen Schneider:
In 1962 when the Seattle World's Fair was on, my new husband and I stopped in Seattle on our way to the Banff/Lake Louise area. My mother's cousin lived in Seattle, and we spent the night with her. She had a collection of glass floats that she had picked up on the beach. I was raised in Indiana, and I was intrigued by the balls and never forgot about them.
It was probably almost 20 years later that our family, now grown to 4, spent a week in Hawaii. We were never ones to spend much time in the touristy places when we traveled, and thus, we were enjoying a "local", relatively empty, beach on the island of Oahu. In the back of my mind, I was thinking how exciting it would be to find a glass float, but I did not think it likely. You cannot imagine how much pleasure it brought me then (and still does to this day) to find a "clutch" of 6 balls. One is quite small, four are somewhat larger, and one is a rolling pin.
Others that we met on the beach seemed to have no interest
in them at all. I couldn't decide if they didn't know what they
were, or if they were such a common occurrence that finding them
was nothing special..
But I know that it was exciting for me. I have only made one visit
to a Pacific beach in my life, and I consider myself to be very
fortunate to have come away with six glass floats.
Karen Schneider
It's 1999 and the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce wants to create a newsworthy event to attract tourists to the area during the slow winter months. Why not recreate the excitement of beachcombing for glass floats? This is what they do, but instead of Japanese glass floats, they have local artists blow 2000 art-glass floats (each about 6" in diameter). These are to be released from October 1999 - December 1999 (and possibly extended into February 2000) along the beaches for tourists.
Apparently, they also released a bunch of floats from a boat just offshore and to their surprise, the floats don't blow onto the beaches, but blow offshore.
Now there are dozens, and possibly hundreds (I heard it was something like 200) of these very attractive, heavy, multicolored fine art-glass floats going around the Pacific waiting for someone to pick them up.
Let me know if you find one of these floats!
Here is the web site that announces the event (I believe the dates where changed to Dec-Feb):
Another Article On The Project
When I was growing up in Newport, Oregon I enjoyed the beach and spent a lot of time exploring the beach and ocean. Naturally, I also enjoyed beachcombing and occasionally found glass floats.
In the spring of 1977 or '78, when I was around 15, my 8 year old nephew, Jason, came to visit. He loved my glass float collection of about 20-30 floats and always wanted to find one. "Well.", I would say, "These floats took me six years to find. Only a few days a year are the conditions right for finding glass floats. It's unlikely the conditions will be right while you're here."
As it turned out, it was late March, the prime beachcombing month, and it had been stormy.
The next morning I found several floats from the previous night's tide, a total of 8. Jason and I walked down to the beach again around noon with the tide coming in and found bottles and other "good signs" but no floats.
We decided to give South Beach a try as it had a reputation for being a good beachcombing location, although I never had much luck there. It was only a short drive and I got my brother to drive us down to the South Beach State Park and we walked out onto the beach. Less than a minute later, Jason found a float, a rolling pin float no less! A few seconds later, I found one. As I looked up the beach, I could see three or four people running up and down the beach picking up floats. It immediately became clear that the glass floats where just rolling in off the surf, so we split up and went opposite directions to cover more ground. For the next half hour we jogged up and down the beach watching the floats just roll in on to the beach. As we passed other people, we could see each other holding floats with pockets stuffed with more.
After about 30 minutes, the floats just stopped coming, the tide was high and had turned, shutting off the supply of glass floats. Since Jason and I got to South Beach only about a half hour before high tide, we missed most of the action. We still netted a dozen floats between the both of us including two rollers, but some of the people we passed had bags full of floats. They had been there all morning. One kid, about 12 years old, was using a plastic tarp that had washed up as a makeshift bag. It was loaded with 40-50 glass floats and he could hardly carry it.
All in all, I would guess that this 2 mile stretch of beach produced over 100 floats during the last 3 hours of incoming tide. It was incredible to just watch a large wave roll in and as it rolled out more often than not, a float would be left behind. All of the floats were small and about 10% of the floats were rolling pin floats.
It took a couple of years to convince Jason that finding glass floats wasn't a simple case of going down to the beach and stuffing your pockets with floats.
A friend mine named Bob told me this story. He was an old-timer in Newport and he taught be how to find glass floats when I was growing up.
Bob had found hundreds of glass floats over the years and he kept a small collection of them in the house. In one collection, he had a number of small floats in a dish. When they would get dusty he would clean them in the sink. One of the floats appeared to be frosted on the inside and had been that way when he found it years ago.
During one of these cleaning sessions, the "frosted" float slipped out of his hand and fell against the sink and cracked. As soon at it cracked he could hear a hissing sound that lasted for a fraction of a second. The float instantly became clear as the "frost" magically disappeared. Also, from the crack, a small haze of smoke wafted upwards.
The was no mistaking the odor from that smoke, it was tobacco smoke! There's almost no doubt that the person who blew that glass float years ago purposely blew smoke into the float. For some reason those smoke particles never settled against the glass, but remained in suspension. As soon as the glass cracked, it escaped.
I've heard stories about people breaking floats just to get "that weird smell". Could it be that they were in love with canned tobacco breath?!!!!
