The weekend started with a spectacular sunset painting the sky with brilliant hues of reds, yellows, blues and even purple.

We figured this was a great sign to get out on the water in our boat to search for treasure. We found it!

And I found three MOONS! … a BABY’S EAR MOON, a SHARK’S EYE MOON, a COLORFUL MOON SHELL…

Clark found a huge empty TRUE TULIP on one of the mud flats around North Captiva…

There was a wrack line of shells on Cayo Costa…

There were hundreds… no, I think there were thousands of SOUTHERN SURF CLAMS littering the beach…

Here are a few all cleaned up…

Here’s a close up of the SOUTHERN SURF CLAM since I’ve never shown them before. This would be a great shell for shell crafting!

We found most of our keepers on the beach but other than Clark’s big TULIP, we only found these little FLY SPECK CERITHS on the mud flats…

We had heard there was red tide moving onto the Cayo Costa area but we didn’t feel that irritating tickle in the chest and had no “red tide cough”. We did see a few dead fish which was kind of creepy at first but then it seems we can always find something cool about any beach drift.

A few more treasures from our weekend in paradise…