Beachcombing

Alaska has great beachcombing - more coastline than all the other states in the Union combined and very few people ever visit most of the beaches. I imagine Alaska today is what it used to be like in Puget sound and on the coast of Oregon. I remember as a kid that my dad had a few glass ball fishing floats in his study that he found when we used to live in Seattle. I would hold them up to the light and roll them around on the carpet. My dad told me that they were very rare and my interest was piqued. I really wanted to find one of my own. Of course I never did - and glass balls sort of took on the aura of moon rocks.

Then I started to do fieldwork in Alaska and got to really beachcomb for the first time. Back in the mid 1980s the Big Off-shore boats were still throwing a lot of trash over board, and the beaches were covered with fascinating stuff. Russian bug spray with the directions in Cyrillic and in 'pictures' for what I imagined were illiterate Siberians; thousands of big plastic balls that people pay 50 bucks for in Maine and use as mooring buoys; Japanese Suntori whiskey bottles - almost always with a couple of fingers of booze still in them. After I had just finished drinking one up my friend Rick Knecht told me with a straight face that the Japanese always left a bit in the bottle for the Gods, but that some Japanese guys cheated and just peed in the bottle to make it look like a good sacrifice to the Gods. Never finished off the Suntori bottles I found after that, but once I did find a whole case of Kirin beer with the caps still on! But glass balls were few and far between. I think Rick Knecht used to find them all before I did. I did not find a glass ball on my own until 1994.

Then in one week near Cape Douglas I found 12, and I also figured out how to find them. And I have been finding them ever since. Two years ago I got to survey a remote island that had really good beachcombing. No one had been there in a year or so. The top picture is of Mark Rusk with our haul from just one afternoon (and we did some archaeological survey work too). We concentrated on the glass balls, but I remember seeing liferings with the names of boats, cool old bottles, plastic floaty toys - loads of stuff. Mark and I just cared about glass balls and we kept a running tally of who found more. I got a 10 ball lead at the start on a lone hike around the back of a lagoon near camp, while Mark did something usefull like supply the camp with drinking water, and I held my lead to the end. Note the 'rolling pin' style glass balls. We found 5 of them - and they are not common.

Glass balls were used to keep the edge of fishing nets on the surface. They come in many different sizes and shapes depending on where they were made and what species of fish was the target. They often are even marked with a symbol designating the factory of origin. There is a very cool book that spells all this out; and it is quite satisfying to be able to hold a glass ball up to the light and say - 'this ball was made in Saporro Japan in the 1950s'. Still the only big ball (over 12 inches round) I ever found was among those first 12 I ever found. I gave it away and have not found another since. Patrick