Friday, August 10, 2012

The New York Times - A Florida Island Draws an Array of Seashells and Their Hunters

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: August 7, 2012 - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/us/florida-island-draws-seashells-and-their-hunters.html


SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — The tide is low. The sun crawls toward the ocean for a final dip. The time is here: The hunt is on.

Hundreds take to the beach near the lighthouse on this hammock-shaped island, hunching over the sand as they dig, lift, inspect and move on. The position is so common it has a name: the Sanibel Stoop. The beachcombers wave and chitchat but, with their competitive instincts primed, they steer clear of one another’s turf, keeping a sharp eye out for dots or spirals or telltale lumps in the sand.

“We take our shelling very seriously,” said Clark Rambo, who is known as Super Sheller Clark, a moniker used, sometimes admiringly, sometimes grudgingly, by his wife, Pam. “Every day on the beach is a treasure hunt, and that’s what makes it so competitive.”

Stretched out as far as the eye can see are shells — large, tiny, cone-shaped, scalloped, spiraled, white, orange, pink. Sanibel Island, and its neighbor, Captiva Island, just off the state’s southwest coast, are where hunters come for a seashell bonanza. There is no other place like it in the country, and very few places like it in the world. On some days, depending on the wind, shells pour onto the beach in piles, seducing even the most jaded beachgoers.

This has been particularly true in the weeks since Tropical Storm Debby, the late June storm that caused flooding and beach erosion along some pockets of Florida’s west coast but proved a boon to seashell hunters.

Sanibel’s largess is in its geometry: It is a 12-mile barrier island with a distinctive curve. The coastline runs west to east rather than north to south. When storms blow in from the northwest, the waves and currents funnel more than 300 shallow-water species of shells right onto the beach. Other parts of the world, like the South Pacific, may draw more species, but the shells are not nearly as easy to find. They require boat trips and dives.

“There are days here when you have layers of shells four feet thick,” said José H. Leal, the director of the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum here. “It’s one of the best places in the world for shelling, for sure.”

Seashells have proved resilient, too. At a time when fish stocks are down and coral reefs are dying, Mr. Leal said seashells — made by mollusks mostly from the calcium carbonate in seawater — continue to thrive.

For some, searching for seashells is a hobby; for others, it is a calling and an obsession that sometimes reaches back generations, with collections passed down like heirlooms. Here, there are shell clubs, shell stores, shell guides, shell excursions, shell crafts and the shell museum.

Inside his shell-festooned house, Mr. Rambo holds dear a black-and-white photo of his room as a boy. The image shows his twin bed, spread with seashells mostly scooped from the Jersey Shore. Mrs. Rambo, an artist, also grew up collecting shells, a shared passion that helped cement the couple’s relationship 18 years ago, despite Mr. Rambo’s being injured during a date.

It happened during a day of shelling on Sanibel early in the courtship; she pushed him (playfully) as he stood, his feet dug into the wet sand.

“My leg did a spiral twist,” he said. “Sounded like a shotgun.”

Now Mrs. Rambo is a sought-after figure on the island — a shell-ebrity, if you will — because of her popular Web site, www.iloveshelling.com. It is routine for her to be stopped to listen to a fan rattle off a list of finds (tulips, conchs, whelks, murex) or to answer a question about where to go and when. (The answer is Lighthouse Beach and Blind Pass, which lies between Sanibel and Captiva at low tide, when the wind is westerly, preferably after a storm.)

On a recent evening, shell hunters hungrily swept the beach with their eyes. They picked up shells and peered inside them.

“Is anybody home in there?” Mrs. Rambo asked. If a mollusk was inside, she placed the shell back on the sand. That is the rule in these parts — no live shelling. Before a 1994 law, people hauled boxes of shells away and began depleting the shoreline.

In front of the lighthouse, a teenage boy picked up a starfish and showed it off. A woman from North Carolina dug a hole. She recognized Mrs. Rambo. “I’ve probably found 15 bittersweets,” Denise Kisko, 56, told her, referring to a scallop-shaped shell. She glanced at a 13-year-old girl who was snooping in her spot. “Don’t you find anything in my pile,” she said, kidding, sort of.

Competition is stiff. The morning last October that Mrs. Rambo found a precious, elusive junonia, a species of sea snail known for its brown spots, she had told friends to meet her at Blind Pass at sunrise. Hoping to beat the competition, she got there before sunrise, with a light on her hat, to hunt solo. She spotted the junonia in a little trench. It was her eureka moment.

“I started screaming,” she said. “I was a shellunatic.”

Never mind that her husband has found four junonia over his lifetime, a remarkable feat he loves to sprinkle into conversations. After he posted a photo of his fourth junonia online, it proved too much for the shell crowd.

“They started booing him on the Web site,” Mrs. Rambo said, with a laugh.
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Make your next vacation on Sanibel Island to experience the world renowned shell covered beaches. Call Reservation Central at 1-800-290-6920 / 239-405-7848 or visit http://www.rescen.com

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Sanibel Island is featured on Fox News Travel - 31 best beach vacations

The 31 best beach vacations
Published August 09, 2012 / Coastal Living - http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2012/08/09/31-best-beach-vacations/


We’ve never found a beach we didn’t love, so to help us narrow down the list, we asked Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman, better known as Dr. Beach, to lend us his expertise. Every year, he picks America’s top 10 beaches after considering factors such as sand softness, water temperature, pollution, and views. Dr. Beach is currently the director of Florida International University’s Laboratory for Coastal Research, but when he isn’t working, he retreats to his favorite seashore, Cape Florida State Park.




Sanibel Island, Florida: Absolutely the best shell-gathering anywhere; try quiet Bowman’s Beach (1-800-290-6920 or http://www.rescen.com/sanibelcaptiva)








Also featured is nearby
Fort Myers Beach, Florida: 
Also promoted as “world’s safest” because it lacks rip currents, this white-sand beach slopes very gradually; you can walk a long way out into the warm, green-blue Gulf of Mexico (1-800-290-6920 or http://www.rescen.com/ftmyersbeach)



To visit Sanibel Island, Florida or Fort Myers Beach, Florida for your next vacation, contact Reservation Central at 1-800-290-6920, local: 239-405-7848 or http://www.rescen.com

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Captiva and Sanibel islands still hold special charm

By FRANK SARGEANT | Tbo.com
Published: July 22, 2012



There may be somewhere in Florida where there are more snook per square foot than at Captiva Island, but if so I've not visited there. Captiva was where I learned to catch snook, back in the days when the most effective tactic known was drifting Redfish Pass with a live pinfish just off bottom — and that method did produce some monsters in its day.

These days, the sardine age has arrived, and most guides and expert anglers depend on finding snook shallow along the edge of the vast flats of Pine Island Sound or along the strikingly beautiful beaches here and getting them into a biting mood by chumming with scaled sardines, a flat-sided, silvery baitfish that seems to be snook candy.


One morning on a recent visit, I strolled out on the fishing dock at South Seas Island Resort and was greeted by not dozens but hundreds of fish, stacked like cordwood under the span and all around it. And as if on signal, when a big school of glass minnows rode the incoming tide past the dock, all those fish went bonkers; the water turned white, and snook were doing headstands in the air all over the shoreline.

These were not the giants I found later in a swash hole along the beach — most were 3 to 4 pounds — but it's a great sign that the future of snooking is bright here despite the 2010 freeze.

Of course, if you're not looking for snook you can always take a kayak or a flats boat and ease along the beach, where plenty of rolling tarpon will greet you from May through September — they particularly like to hang around the break line where the darker water from the sound meets the clear water of the Gulf — and so do Spanish mackerel, ladyfish, jacks and blues among other species.

On the inside, places like Rock Channel are famed as trout holes, and Pine Island trout are often big, lanky yellowmouths. There are also lots of potholes around the many mangrove islands here, all of them likely stops for snook — and for redfish as summer turns to fall.

In short, it's gamefish central, and the islands — Captiva on the north, Sanibel on the south, and Blind Pass dividing them — are one of Florida's greatest treasures.

Ding Daring National Wildlife Refuge, on the Sanibel end, offers a look at Florida the way it used to be, with gators, deer and an amazing variety of birds including roseate spoonbills, which look sort of like miniature pink flamingoes.

Of course, you don't need to go to the refuge to see every variety of shorebird Florida has to offer — the abundant fish populations and healthy supply of crustaceans and other beach critters provide a continuing feast for the waders; they are perhaps more abundant and less wild here than anywhere in the state, making it a bird-watchers paradise.

If you're a beach person, the beaches here are some of the prettiest in the state, with a very gentle shelf that makes them great for kids — and for those nervous about some of the larger sea critters in deeper water. They also have the unique distinction of being near the top world-wide for those who love to collect sea shells — some 400 varieties have been found here, along with the occasional fossil manatee bone or horse tooth. In many places, the stacks of shells are 2 feet deep.


There are also world-class resorts on both islands. Perhaps the crown jewel is South Seas Island Resort, which has just undergone a $140 million makeover. The resort covers the entire northern tip of Captiva, stretching some 2 miles up to Redfish Pass.

On the west side is the beach, on the east side Pine Island Sound, and in between every imaginable sort of accommodation from 5,000-square-foot beach houses to one-bedroom condos, every one of them an easy walk to the beach. The resort was devastated by Hurricane Charley and was out of business for more than a year. But the restoration gave the new owners a chance for refocus as well as rebuild.

"We went from being a luxury resort mostly for couples to a family-friendly place where kids will want to come year after year," marketing manager Daniel Smock said. "We've got mini golf, kayaks, a swimming attraction with slides, nature trails, day care and a lot more, and many added activities that are supervised, allowing parents to drop off their kids and spend a little time on their own, as well."

Oh, yeah — kids eat free in summer. That's a big mistake if my grandkids show up, but that's the deal.

And that dock with all the snook? It's right out front where the pass meets the sound, and you don't need a license to fish there because it's covered by a dock permit. Take plenty of tackle.



For details on South Seas Island Resort, visit 

For more information on the area, visit