Sand Dollar Sea Glass
Handmade Jewelry and Gifts
Wire Wrapped and Drilled Designs

Souris, Prince Edward Island (Canada)

We chose to begin our March 2019 Canadian visit with Souris, which seemed an obvious choice for sea glass hunters. After all, it is home to an annual sea glass festival, with many local artisans, and local Bed and Breakfast places incorporate “Sea Glass” into their names. But is it a sea glass destination? The answer is: it depends on what you’re looking for.

Using our usual strategy, we arrived in the off-season (late March) in hopes of getting a clean shot at the beaches and some storm activity. We got an early start and headed to Souris Beach Provincial Park, often mentioned in online sites. The beach did not fit the profile of usual glass beaches.  It was scattered with glass, but it was all recently broken with sharp edges - the type that we would routinely pick up and throw into a trash receptacle as a courtesy to recreational beach goers. There was so much of it and so little other litter that we wondered if it had been put there deliberately. We also noted that the sign with beach rules included a warning that glass was present on the beach. This may be an attempt at providing a source for future sea glass, but in my experience, modern, highly engineered glass does not make for good sea glass.

After hard hunting we found a single “craft grade” piece among the hundreds of shards. This is not what we wanted, so we decided to look around at other nearby beaches.

A warning to off-season travelers to the northeast: it is often the practice to pull up the stairs leading down to beaches during the winter months. This means that a (sometimes exciting) climb may be required to reach a beach, especially if there is any ice. However, we didn’t travel all the way to Prince Edward Island to give up without searching for glass, so we forged ahead.

On some beaches, the beach environment of surf and shingle seemed right, but glass was scarce - of a quality and size as would be found on any similar beach. One of the locals pointed out that the island was “pretty much like a ghost town” before construction of the Confederation toll bridge connecting it to land in 1997, so we guessed that the missing ingredient was a dumping site with a plentiful source of century-old glass to wash up.

So, if your interest is meeting artisans and sea glass lovers, this would be a destination during the tourist season and especially during the festival. We understand that there are sea glass experiences offered that teach sea glass aficionados jewelry and artwork techniques and the like. If there is a local beach with a high concentration of high quality glass, we didn’t discover it. A little discouraged after our search here, we headed for Inverness Beach in Nova Scotia, which was about a six-hour drive but is a glass hunter’s dream. A trip to Souris to meet the artisans combined with a trip to Inverness to find glass might be a sea glass hunter's destination vacation if you don’t mind some windshield time or ferry rides. 

Please come to one of the venues and we can trade information on our glass hunting trips!

Other beaches I have visited:
1. Seaham Beach, Seaham, England, U.K
2. Vieques Island, Vieques, Puerto Rico, USA
3. North Bimini, Bahamas
4. Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada
5. McCurdy Point, Port Townsend, Washington, USA
6. Texas Gulf Coast
7. Maine Coast (USA)
8. Souris, Prince Edward Island, Canada
 
nancyb@sanddollarseaglass.com

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