10 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JUNE 5-11, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com 831 Planet earth has a lot to offer in terms of amorphous material, usually by way of heat to make glass. But when artificial glass gets caught in the cold dynamism of the ocean, sea glass hunters rejoice at the prospect of finding and collecting treasure on the beaches. There’s a signature to the sea glass found on Monterey County beaches. Just ask sea glass hunter Carrie McWithey. She has been creating wearable jewelry pieces made of sea glass she has found for over four years and sells her creations via Etsy and through her website Nautilus and Sway. She’s been a resident of Monterey County for 14 years, but has always been a self-described “collector of things.” She grew up on Lake Michigan where she would hunt for fossils and “beach glass,” but when the Covid-19 pandemic descended upon her home in Monterey, she found her escape was finding sea glass at the beach, since she had to be away from people. “I just started hauling it in and it was everywhere,” McWithey says. During that time, McWithey would mostly hunt for sea glass at Del Monte Beach in Monterey, and she says her success depends on a few factors, like if it was low tide or after a recent storm. But those rarely determine if she is able to find sea glass or not. “I feel like I could find a piece every time I was on the beach. At least one piece, if not hundreds,” she says. Experienced hunters have some terminology for the places to find sea glass. McWithey says you can generally find pieces where rocks are present, which she and other hunters call “the gravel.” Another geographic factor is slope—for instance, a place in Sand City north of Tioga Avenue has a steep slope where sea glass can wash ashore and tumble down in a pile. As ubiquitous as sea glass is, McWithey says the surprise moments are finding it in rarer colors. “I do remember the very first time I found a red, which is super rare and everyone talked about it,” McWithey recalls. “I had probably been searching for a couple of years in Monterey and I found it right by Fisherman’s Wharf.” According to her, the rarest color to find is orange because it was not a high-demand color for objects through the 1950s. Because of the presence of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Salinas, common colors of sea glass are mostly sea foam greens and blues, but cobalt blues and even lavender purple are also found. Sea glass itself is essentially trash, which McWithey endearingly refers to as “treasure trash.” Prior to the proliferation of plastic found in most trash today, the most common material for objects was glass and porcelain. Those materials are naturally tumbled between 10-80 years before it becomes the frosty sea glass that hunters look for. For a purist like McWithey, though, the ocean provides the only processing that she needs to create jewelry pieces. “There is something more authentic about something the ocean already created perfectly,” she says. “There’s no beauty in plastic.” McWithey isn’t the only one hunting sea glass. Repeat beachgoers are out in the same spots on a regular basis. There are also one-time visitors and anybody can become a sea glass hunter on just one visit to the beach. Also, one doesn’t have to be a jewelry-maker or collector to appreciate a piece of sea glass that the ocean has formed over time—just a bowl of a handful of pieces can become its own type of art. McWithey’s sea glass jewelry features large, colorful pieces on wire hoops as earrings, or on chains as necklaces, filtering the light. “I think people who appreciate sea glass jewelery are already their own kind of amateur or avid sea glass collectors so they have this nostalgia,” she says. “They want to remember their own experiences and they find a piece that represents that for them.” Carrie McWithey‘s work is sold at boutiques around Monterey County, including The Phoenix Shop at Nepenthe, Big Sur Lodge and Esselen Institute. Nautilus and Sway is her online retail shop and can be found at nautilusandsway.com. Multi-Colored Glasses A sea glass hunter creates jewelry by letting the ocean do the refining. By Sloan Campi Most of Carrie McWithey’s creative process involves sorting the mounds of sea glass she hauls up. If there’s a good series of low tides, she’ll be out hunting nearly every day with crab rakes in the water. “There’s no beauty in plastic.” TALES FROM THE AREA CODE DANIEL DREIFUSS Visitors are ready to spend MAP • RECREATION • ARTS EVENTS • GOLF • DRINKS BEACHES • RESTAURANTS Published by BEST OF MONTEREY BAY® Visitors GUIDE FREE 2024-2025 cover_vg24.indd 1 6/20/24 3:25 PM Invite them to your business in the Best of Monterey Bay® Visitors Guide, the go-to source for everything local COMING JUNE 2025 AD SUBMISSION DEADLINE JUNE 9 FOR MORE INFO: 831-394-5656 sales@montereycountynow.com
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