Beach Photography: The Strangest Things I Found Beachcombing in 2025
A collection of the most interesting objects I came across on the beach this year.
I live close enough to walk to the beach, so I spend a lot of time wandering the shoreline and beachcombing for shells, sea glass, driftwood, and other interesting finds. Along the way I always end up spotting odd and unexpected objects mixed in with the sand and seaweed. Some of them are funny, some feel a little strange, and some are just plain puzzling, but they all make me pause and look twice.
I started photographing these unusual beach finds last year (click here to see last year’s post) as a way to document them and remind myself of the stories they might carry. It always makes me wonder where each item came from. Was it left behind after a day at the beach, carried in by the waves from somewhere far away, or pulled out to sea during a storm and returned again? I will probably never know, but the mystery is part of why I love noticing and capturing them.
Here are some interesting found objects from my walks on the beach over the past year.
My Strangest Beachcombing Finds of 2025
I’ve never found a propeller on the beach before, so this one definitely made the my of strangest things I came across while beachcombing this year. Maybe it came from a small watercraft, although I’d hope they usually use metal instead of plastic.
This was probably my weirdest find of the year, a dinosaur mask washed in with the tide. I can’t imagine the story behind how it ended up in the ocean in the first place.
This was a new one for me, a lightbulb on the beach. I can’t help wondering about its story and how it ended up here, whether from careless dumping or from storm damage somewhere along the coast. I’m surprised the bulb wasn’t broken even though it looks like it’s been in the water a while.
I had no idea what this was at first and ended up doing an image search. I wondered if it was some kind of deep-sea plant, but it turns out it’s an Osage orange (also called a hedge apple) that actually grows on trees, not in the ocean. How it wound up washed onto the beach is still a mystery, especially since I’ve never seen them growing anywhere around here.
Related: Best of Beachcombing: My Favorite Shells, Sea Glass, and Beach Pottery Finds
I did a little research and learned this is a Big Turbo Wheels police truck. I found it in winter, so it had probably been in the water for quite a while before washing ashore.
Finding a ball on the beach isn’t unusual. Finding this many in one day is. These four were part of at least thirty sports balls washed up in just the small stretch of beach I walked that day. I still can’t make sense of why so many appeared at once.
I found a shocking number of plastic Easter eggs again this year. I’m not sure how they all end up in the ocean, but seeing so many washed up has completely changed how I think about them.
This baseball cap brim really took me by surprise. I often see forgotten clothing and stray shoes on the beach, but never just a brim. It must have been in the water a long time for it to separate from the rest of the hat.
I really enjoyed gathering these unusual beach finds over the past year. Whenever something unexpected caught my eye while I was walking, I snapped a photo and saved it for this project. I ended up with far more than I could reasonably include here, so this is just a selection of some favorites. I also take part in several organized beach cleanups each year and do many on my own, so a lot of the objects you see in these photos were removed from the shoreline rather than left behind.
All photos in this blog post are my original photography. Feel free to repost them uncropped, but please credit me with a link back to this blog. Thank you!
Save This Beachcombing Photography of Unusual Found Objects
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Photography: The strangest things I found while beachcombing in 2025
Have you found an unusual object on the beach? Share your strangest beachcombing finds in the comments.
