Glass Fishing Floats

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2021-08-21 14:30:07

What was the initial spark for my passion for finding and collecting glass fishing floats? Going back to the spring of 1977, my wife and I were in the midst of a 23,000 mile odyssey with our 7-month old baby daughter comfortably bundled up in her car seat with a tomcat on either side of her, in a fully packed '71 Volkswagen Beetle. We met and stayed a short while with a group of people near Shi Shi Beach on the Neah Bay Indian Reservation in Washington State. Three of them lived on the beach in rent free log cabins built by the forestry service, and managed to keep themselves in food through the sale of their art and by finding and selling glass fishing floats. Having always been a guy who loved to find things like old bottles and arrowheads, my spirit perked up excitedly when I heard of their tales about finding glass fishing floats on the beach after big onshore wind storms. The floats were gathered after the storms and then sold in Port Townsend to an antiques dealer. During the hike down the beach to visit these artists in their cabins, my wife and I found two floats hidden among the piles of huge beached logs, and one more glass ball floating in the sunlit water at the end of a rocky point. Holding the newly found floats up to the sky to see their colors, and talking excitedly about them, we felt a wonderful surge of happiness from the findings. A fire within me was ignited!

That was thirty years ago, and the excitement of finding and learning about glass fishing floats has not subsided. Those first three floats have morphed into a large collection. My wife and I still share the excitements of our first finds.