An Early Morning Sand Dollar Hunt

One morning Alex, Michaela and I had an amazing and memorable walk along the beach. We saw, in approximate order: 6 dolphins jumping, one medium-sized sea turtle swimming, 2 huge hermit crabs (caught by a grandfather and grandson), 2 good sized sand sharks skimming along the surf, and countless sand dollars for our brand new collection.

The last bit was thanks to a woman that we met on our walk, who was walking with a net and a bucket like the ones we were carrying, who showed us how she was catching small sand dollars the size of dimes or pennies in the surf. These were not live sand dollars (these don't wash up), but formerly live sand dollar exoskeletons. We were surprised that they were not white but were beautiful pastel shades of lavendar, blue and pink, and therefore blend in with the sand. It takes a keen eye to find these little guys tumbling through the surf (Michaela is now Eagle Eyes Crews, and was great at spotting them). We immediately abandoned our seashell search and starting looking ourselves for sand dollars. As we found out, once you collect a teeny weeny sand dollar, great care must be taken to transport it because these little guys are extremely fragile. Our first plan of simply holding a sand dollar between thumb and forefinger to carry home didn't work, because they would snap into pieces. We had to place them in our bucket and treat the bucket with great care. Once we knew where and how to find sand dollars, it was hard to stop looking! That's a great thing about being on vacation in a new environment: you see things you've never noticed before. For the rest of the week, we didn't venture to the beach without a net and bucket to continue our sand dollar hunting.


Inspired by the grandfather and grandson we met who were hunting hermit crabs, that night after dark we went out crabbing ourselves and got pretty good at catching crabs. Michaela was good at spotting the white crabs in the dark, Sophia great at squealing and running the other way, and Alex was quick with the net for catching the crabs. We had a great time doing this too, although didn't get any pictures of our nighttime beach excursion.

Now that we are home, we are soaking our sand dollars in fresh water to clean them, then we will bleach them white with a little bleach water, then strengthen them with a glue-water mixture, so we can save our finds for many years!