| Beachcombing
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1. Beachcombing on Langara Island2. Glass balls - the dream of every beachcomber3. The great pacific running shoe ultra-marathon |
 Glass Ball |
1. Langara Island 
I lived on Langara between the ages of about 10 - 16. We had many adventures while we were there. My favorite thing to do was beachcombing. In those days you could find "dollar bottles". Ocean Station Papa sent out these bottles with a message stating that if the paper inside was returned, you would receive a dollar. (They did it for the purpose of tracking ocean currents.) A dollar was a lot of money to a child in those days (late fifties, early sixties), so finding one was a source of great excitement. Japanese glass fishing balls were another treasure, although in those days, they were pretty common. They ranged in size from Ping-Pong ball size, to sizes larger than a basketball. Their colours were mostly green, although we did find them in brown. Sometimes they still had remnants of their net on. I have since heard that any that are purple are highly coveted, as they belong to nets belonging to ancient royalty. We never found any. Dead sea animals were always a source of great interest to our dogs and myself. They expressed their delight by rolling in the remains, no matter how long dead and stinky! One carcass I found was a mystery we never solved. It was a bedraggled bald eagle, missing its talons from the mid point of his legs down, and missing the one portion of it’s beak. We wondered if he had hooked onto a fish far too big for him to drag to shore. Often there were remnants of a boat or wharf, pieces of bamboo, and other mysterious planks. One could only wonder where they originated from, and how long they had drifted. My child’s mind imagined pirates and wild shipwrecks and lost souls . . . - Jeannie Nielsen (daughter of Ed Hartt, Senior Keeper on Langara 1957 - 1963) |
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 Glass Balls  Our 14 ft. Zodiac  Different colours  Various sizes  Pontil mark  Rolling pin shape  In the nets |
2. Glass Balls - the Dream of every Beachcomber In my years on the lights there was always talk of finding a glass ball. The inside lights such as my first one at Pulteney Point did not have too much chance of stopping a floating glass ball because of the strong tides.
My first "outside light" [not sheltered by land] was Quatsino but with only one beach at the back of the island and all the rest rocky it was nigh on impossible. Pachena wasn't much better and we weren't there long enough to hit the beaches around the area. Green Island was like Pulteney but we did find one or two there sitting in the pools.
So a real outside light was waiting! We moved to McInnes Island in 1977 and in the next couple of years we outfitted a fourteen (14) foot Zodiac with a 25 HP outboard with which we could go beachcombing. The children were still young then (see photo left) so a lot of the beachcombing was done alone with not much luck. Oh, I found a couple but nothing big. Then a friend came up and he found a larger one - about 12 inches in diameter along with a couple of small ones.
And then came Ted Beard as my assistant with his smaller Zodiac and it then became a competition to see who could find the most. In the spring of one of the years after Ted arrived on station, March 1981 or '82, we hit a bonanza! The spring weather was absolutely calm and the glass balls started arriving out of that nest in the sky.* They came by the hundreds! Really! We went out beachcombing and you could see them in the kelp before we even got to the beaches. We had to invest in a long-handled net to scoop them out as the kelp fouled the motor and slowed us down. We found them floating, we found them sitting on the rocks and we found them drifting.
Ted used to get up for morning shift and after the weather sit and watch the foaming tidal stream flowing into Catala Passage around the front of the light. He used binoculars to search for them in the foam and many's a morning I heard the diesel winch fire up early as Ted had sighted another large one. I got to see the results of his searches later in the morning. When heading for the beaches and bays on Price Island we always followed the tide lines (small trails of foam floating along with the current) and usually picked up one or two. We got large ones (some 18"+ in diameter), small ones (some so small you could hold three or four in your hand), rolling pins, barbells (two balls attached side by side). Some came with net, a lot without and some in plastic covers (orange or black) and many were abraded by the sand, leaving net marks or scrapes. And all colours of the rainbow - mostly greenish, but others were clear, blue, brown. Seamed, unseamed and one or two even had seals stamped in a glob of glass ( a pontil*) on the side. (see photo at left) Ted even found a large one attached to a light. This was a light similar to what the BC fishermen used to light the end of their gillnets at night. It had the lamp at top, a hollow tube frame carrying the wires bellied out in the middle to enclose a large glass ball in net which was tied into the space. At the bottom was a motorcycle battery enclosed in a waterproof case which supplied the power. The battery and case also acted as ballast to keep it upright. Real homemade but quite effective and fairly soild as the whole system was thrown back up in the Salal bushes by the waves and required two of us to get it out. Water had got into the electricals but the glass ball was intact. It only lasted a month, but when we added them up when hunting tapered off, we had over 400 glass balls between the two families! Not to mention all the other stuff that came along with them - exotic woods, stainless fishing gear complete with lures attached, glass bottles of every shape, sort and size, and plastic floats! So many plastic floats we were shipping them out on the helicopter for the guys in Prince Rupert to use on their crab traps.
- John Coldwell - Retired Keeper from Pulteney, Kains, Pachena, Green, and McInnes (1969 - 2001) I was Googling for some glass ball images on the Internet when a bunch of great photos came up. They were made by BeachComberBum for his eBay pages.
I wrote to him and received permission to use his photos to help illustrate these pages. Once I had downloaded the photos and looked at them in Internet Explorer I just had to share with you the view of so many glass balls all on one page!. BeachComberBum also has some very nice photos of beachcombing in Alaska on his Yahoo photo album pages. *For more information on the source(s) of glass balls check out this Wikipedia article, or this Beacomber's site. I don't know which is correct but they make interesting reading. *The pontil, or punty, is a solid metal rod that is usually tipped with a wad of hot glass, then applied to the base of a vessel to hold it during manufacture. It often leaves an irregular or ring-shaped scar on the base when removed. This is called the "pontil mark." from The Store Finder |
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 Running shoe on beach |
3. The Great Pacific Running Shoe Ultra-Marathon I remember this very well as I could never find a matching pair! - JAC
In late [27th] May of 1990, the container vessel Hansa Carrier encountered a severe storm in the north Pacific Ocean (approx. 48°N, 161°W)******************************* on its passage from Korea to the United States. During the storm, a large wave washed twenty-one shipping containers overboard. Five of these 20-metre containers held a shipment of approximately 80,000 Nike® shoes ranging from children's shoes to large hiking boots. It has been estimated that four of the five containers opened into the stormy waters, releasing over 60,000 shoes into the north Pacific Ocean.
The following winter, hundreds of these shoes washed ashore on the beaches of the Queen Charlotte Islands , western Vancouver Island , Washington and Oregon . With the help of beachcombers from British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, Ebbesmeyer was able to determine that hundreds of shoes were recovered. When Oregon newspapers began running the story, the Associated Press picked it up, and the word spread. The publicity resulted in many additional reports of the finding of Nike shoes on Pacific beaches. Dubious about some of the reported finds, Ebbesmeyer decided to confine his study to only those shoes found in groups of 100 or more. Even with this restriction, he accounted for approximately 1300 shoes from the more than 60,000 released.
Despite a year in the ocean, much of the footwear was in fine shape and wearable after a washing. Unfortunately, the shoes were not tied to one another so that matching pairs did not always reach the beach together. Each shoe, however, had an identifying serial number, and with information obtained from the manufacturer, Ebbesmeyer was able to determine that the shoes were indeed from the Hansa Carrier. The accident turned into a scientific gold mine. With information on the locations where the shoes were found, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were able to use the spill to test and calibrate their ocean current model. In the past when researchers have released a multitude of drift bottles to provide data for testing models, only about one or two percent of the drift bottles are typically recovered. Thus, the accidental release of approximately 61,000 shoes and the recovery of approximately 1600 shoes (2.6%) provided data as good as any pre-planned study. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham used the OSCURS model to determine where and how the shoes may have drifted after the containers were swept overboard. The model suggested that the main landfall would have been around the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the central coast of British Columbia approximately 249 days after the spill. The first reports of shoe landfall came from Vancouver Island and Washington approximately 220 days after the spill. A large number of shoes were recovered in the Queen Charlotte Islands and northern Oregon suggesting that when the shoes neared the North American coast, some were diverted north and others south by coastal currents. In the summer of 1992, shoes were reported arriving at the northern end of the Island of Hawaii. After reaching North America, these shoes may have continued southward along the California coast and then been pushed off the coast by currents moving westward to Hawaii. The rest of the story on the Weather Doctor's website - Keith C. Heidorn (aka The Weather Doctor) Also see this Wikipedia article on the Hansa Carrier and other incidents of a similar nature.
Check out this Google Earth KML file which shows locationswhere some of the shoes were found. And if you are interested, this is where the other 57,000+ shoes probably ended up! |
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| John Coldwell (retired BC lighthouse keeper) Galvanistrasse 8 A-4040 Linz, Austria Tel: +43 (732) 750515  |