Lauren Tjaden

Today, I am on stunning Sanibel Island, which is on Florida's gulf coast, just a little bit north of Fort Myers Beach. Besides boasting beautiful beaches, the “Ding” Darling Nature Preserve, and just an abundance of quirky little shops and restaurants, this is known as one of the sweetest places on the entire planet for shelling.

Sanibel is home to the Bailey Matthews Shell Museum and today, Kathleen, one of its staff members, is going to show us around the museum, give us tips on shelling, and take us out to one of the island's hotspots.

Kathleen Hoover

Sanibel's a great place to shell and there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is the orientation of the island. It runs east and west. The second is, it's a barrier island and it doesn't hug the coast like most barrier islands do. The floor of the sea is like a handicap ramp. It's very gradual. And so, and then the shape of the island also is kind of like a boomerang or a piece of shrimp. So those three things work together.

Well generally, when you shell, you would zig-zag the beach. So you would start at the high tide line, the part of the beach that's wet at the highest area. And then you'd come down the beach in kind of a V, an inverted V, and you'd look in all the areas that you saw piles of shells. And then you'd come into the water, and maybe up to your knees or so, if you're comfortable with that, and you'd actually look for the reflections and the shapes and the colors that you might see underneath the water.

Lauren Tjaden

That was really fun. I liked the museum and I learned a lot. Like that there are 300 [three hundred] species of shells you can find right here on Sanibel. And as for the shelling itself, you're out in nature, it's beautiful, you're on the ocean. It's an adventure, it's a treasure hunt. The whole family can do it.

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