shell collection competition 2026 | Miss Mustard Seed

The jokes, comments, and ribbing about the shell collection competition started happening the first afternoon we arrived at our rental house on Isle of Palms.  I walked out to the beach for our first visit of the vacation and found a small pale gray whelk at the base of the sign at the beach entrance we use most.  I posted to my Instagram Stories, “Let the games begin.”

There’s always a lot of banter around the competition.  My mom accuses me of cheating and points out unfair aspects of the competition, like I’m able to walk in the surf and she isn’t. I’m also the one who gets to make the commentary since it’s posted on my Instagram account and blog.  I remind her each year that she is welcome to start a blog and social media channels to host her own competition.  She has yet to take me up on that.  We debate who can offer help and whether the shells found by Jeff or the boys are valid entries.

She always wins in a landslide, though, and I remind her of that!  As I’ve shared in previous years, it’s all in good fun.  She gives me “Marian shells” and I give her shells I know she will like.  I think the banter has become as much of a tradition as the competition itself.  At least this year she wasn’t boasting about it to strangers on the beach!

So, onto the collections…

I think the shell collection I amassed this Spring Break might be my favorite ever.  I’ve really dialed in what I love, and I think that shows in the shells I put forward.  Of course, my collection consists mostly of whelks and olive shells since they are my two favorites.  And they are mostly blues, gray, and blue-black.  I did include some lighter shells, so Jeff didn’t repeat his joke that I found all of my shells on the beaches of Mordor.

I learned this year that the darker the shell, the older it likely is.  Some of these might be thousands of years old, which is pretty wild.

This was a great year for whelks.  I’ve gotten very good at spotting them, even if only a tiny bit is showing.  I pulled a substantial one out of the sand by the “tail” this year!  I also included some whelk skeletons or “wheletons”, whelk ribbons (whibbons?), chunky imperfect whelks, coral, a fossil, a slipper snail shell, and a few oyster “sculptures”.

You can see the whelk that opens opposite at the top left of the photo below, for those who were curious.

I think I unearthed almost all of the black and gray olives from the “whelk graveyard” I discovered, so it was a banner year for gray olives.

Here is my mom’s collection…

I’d like to point out a few things, as I did when I shared her collection on my Instagram Stories.  First of all, I think I’m starting to influence her a bit.  Notice some of the crusty, broken, imperfect shells?  I don’t know if she would’ve collected those even two years ago.

The second thing is that I found several of the shells in her collection, including half of the sanddollars, some of the tiny whelks, a bunch of snail shells, augers, lady’s ears, and even some of the whelks and olives I dug up from the whelk graveyard or fetched from the surf for her.  I do take into account that she has to wear shoes to keep her feet in good working order, and I can go barefoot.  That gives me greater access to shells in the surf and tide pools, so I do help collect those for her.

I do not share olive shells, though, even with my mother.

Despite pointing out my kindness and contributions to the voters, I had a feeling she would win the competition again.  After all, the vote is based on the collection itself, not how it was collected or the sportsmanship displayed by the participants.  (My mom said she wanted to kick over my neat rows of olive shells when I was filming them for the vote, so perhaps sportsmanship should be taken into account!)

Calvin said the collections needed to be shown anonymously for the vote, so it was fair.  My mom and I both laughed at that because anyone who has seen a previous shell competition would know immediately which collection belonged to which collector.  We did it anyway, and the voting regulars understood the joke.

Well, Mom won the competition again, but I still felt victorious.  Last year, I only earned 24% of the vote.  The year before that, it was 13%.  This year, I got a whopping 39% of the vote!  I mean, that’s practically a tie.  And given that I found a bunch of her shells, it’s sort of a win for me as well.  Basically, I won.

Collecting shells together is our favorite thing to do at the beach, and we were both happy with our finds.  We have bags of shells to take back north to put in our gardens and homes.  Every time I see them, I’ll remember waking up before sunrise, walking on the beach, looking for a little lump in the sand that might be a whelk. It’ll take me back to the thrill I feel when I see an olive shell sitting on the flats at low tide.  I’ll laugh at the ridiculousness of how seriously we take our shelling and already look forward to next year.

And I’ll always feel thankful for the time I get to enjoy the beauty of the world and the bounty of the sea.

You can read about previous Shell Collection Competitions below (we didn’t go to the beach in 2023)…

2025 Comp

2024 Comp

2022 Comp