[Narrator] For the people of Ocean Shores, Washington, life revolves around the beach.
In fact, almost the entire town is a beach. It’s surrounded by 10 kilometres of white
sand. Wide intertidal expanses that stretch out to the sea for
hundreds of metres at low tide.
And in Ocean Shores, beach culture runs this town from dawn ... till dusk.
“Explore the shores,” states their tourism website and that’s exactly
what you’ll find most people doing.
But this weekend, at the annual beachcomber’s fair, Ocean Shores
is focused on one aspect of beach tourism in particular.
Scavenging the beaches for treasure.
Well, that’s one word for it.
[Older man] A bicycle, one year we entered that in. Oh yeah, we found a huge old
container filled up with hundreds of EpiPens.
[Younger man] Rat poison canisters.
[Older man] Oh yeah one year we found hundreds of aluminum rat poison canisters.
[Narrator] After an early morning beach walk, experts from the fair
examine the discoveries. Among the odds and ends
this year, they’ve been finding something even more out of the ordinary.
[Beachcomber] One lump of coal.
[Judge] Ooh there isn’t any munition in there, is there? Look there’s
a shiny thing right there.
[Narrator] Yep, they’ve been finding unexploded ordnances.
Adds a little excitement to a casual beach walk, no?
After all, one person’s trash is another's treasure.
Or, it could just be trash. The judges are here to tell the difference
Inside the exhibition hall, they assess and reward the most incredible finds.
[Judge] I like the swirls in this.
[Narrator] More than 60 exhibitors, a binder of messages found in bottles, tables heavy
with umbrella handles, sobering reminders of the Japanese tsunami, and bottles of
booze you could probably still take a swig out of.
A hall full of people who live by the rule, finders keepers.
But this year, on the doors to the exhibition hall, these signs warn
beachcombers that if they find ordnances, they had better not touch them.
The Cadillac of beach finds, a quick look around the tables makes it obvious. Glass
floats used in fishing nets in Japan that have drifted across the sea are among
the most traditionally sought after items at these festivals.
Hand blown in all shapes and sizes, these floats often have marks on them that
can be used to trace them back to their makers, like this one from northern Japan.
If only it were as easy to trace the munitions.
But the locals have their theories.
[Greg Wolf] Apparently, recently, a lot of these old 20mm anti-aircraft shells have
been rolling in. They were dumped by the navy back at the end of the Second World
War, and we’ve been finding them for years and years and years but for whatever
reason a lot of them are coming in right now and people aren’t aware of
what they are or what you should do.
[Brad Johansson] Oh there’s lots of ideas but you know, there’s nothing confirmed.
I mean the theories are that either they were buried at some point and then they’re
just starting to surface through erosion, or, the other thing is, they felt like they
possibly could’ve been dumped off of a ship and in containers or something like
that and maybe the containers broke open or something like that. I don’t know.
[Narrator] In the nearby town of Moclips at the Museum of the North Beach, curator
Kelly Calhoun says only three have been turned in in the last decade.
Until the last few weeks, that is.
[Kelly Calhoun] A gentleman came in and said “look what I found” and he found three
of them in one day. And that was the beginning of what’s now become this big story.
[Narrator] They’ve even got a few on display at the museum. They may be covered in
mineralized gunk, but sure enough, the shells are unmistakeable.
[Brad Johansson] Yeah, the beaches are still really safe, we’ve had no issues of
the ordnances blowing up or exploding. They’re designed to explode upon impact
after being shot out of a gun.
[Narrator] Is it actually safe for people to be collecting them? Even the museum in
Moclips has a few in their collection.
[Brad Johansson] That's the first I heard of it. Well now that I know that we’ll
probably send someone up there to get them.
[Narrator] Because of the recent surge of washed up munitions, the local sheriff’s
office has been rounding them up on the beaches for the army to deal with.
[Greg Wolf] Well, when they blew up some yesterday we had a bucket of them that
we'd been collecting forever, just for fun, and they collected them up,
took them down and about an hour later they set them off in front of the navy
base which is roughly a mile from us. And it was just like a M-80. A boom.
[Narrator] Beaches are usually full of good vibrations, but this is
a little much for the locals.
[Lee Marriott] There are people a hundred feet up on the bluff and it shook their
home, like rattled their home. And these explosions were going on ... when they first
started occurring it was 11 o’clock at night and three o’clock in the morning and
without any warning about the fact that they were going to be doing them.
[Narrator] Folks aren’t sure if they should be concerned with the findings or just
annoyed with the blasts.
[Kelly Calhoun] As far as we’re concerned, they may be dangerous but we’ve handled
ours for 10 years with no problem. We don’t want to drop them, but still.
[Lee Marriott] My thought though is really if this was really such a danger, we
shouldn’t even be allowed to be standing here on the beach.
[Narrator] Who knows? Maybe next year the beachcomber fair will have a category
for best unexploded ordnance.