Shipwreck Beach (first visit)

It's Saturday! Let's explore! I'll start out by saying that I've had an obsession with glass fishing floats since January 2011 when we visited Jekyll Island in Georgia and saw these beauties in their monthly visitor's guide...

Jekyll Island hides the floats on the island during the months of January and February each year. We searched while we were there, but never found one (We did buy one at the visitor's center, but obviously would have been way better to find on the beach). Authentic floats used by fisherman are not quite as artistically designed in terms of color, these were made by artists for the event, and they were gorgeous!
So...since then I have known what these "glass balls" are and have always hoped to have the chance to find one. When doing my reading before moving here I found that Japan, even more specifically Northern Japan, happens to be a great place to find glass fishing floats! The chance to find a float was one of those little things that started to make me excited to move here. And that is what lead me to choose Shipwreck Beach as the first place to explore when we got here. I'd read that it was a good place to find the floats and if not a float then a chance to collect some sea glass...either way, not something I could do in the Midwest!
Here's a link for a little info on the glass floats and why Japan is a good place to find them for anyone that's interested...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_float

Sorry for the tangent there, but I felt like if I didn't explain the floats a lot of upcoming posts about me hunting for them wouldn't make much sense!

Shipwreck Beach! It was a little over one hour away and really when we got there we weren't sure if we were in the right place or not. We parked in a dirt lot then had to go around a gate to get to a path toward the beach. Right away I was thrown off by all the trash on the beach. I'm not talking a few plastic bottles here and there. There was stuff everywhere! Not what I expected. We walked the beach for a couple of hours and collected lots of sea glass. No floats though. :( We did find what was left of the ships on the beach. There had been several ships on the beach but only a couple of months ago they were torn down. At least the weather was decent, after having chilly, rainy days since we'd been here it was finally warmer (70's) but was still cloudy.


Here's a map to give you a visual of where it is and the route we took going there. It's not on the Pacific coast it's northwest of Misawa on the Mutsu Bay.

This is what most of the highways look like, narrow with no shoulder

Little shop on the road side with an outdoor fish market.

Flower shop.

This is the gate we went around to get to the beach.

Path to the beach.

Jellyfish.

Trash on the beach.

Picking up sea glass.

More of the dirtiness.

What was left of one of the ships.

Tried climbing to the top but the rocks
were sliding too much, I had to give up

After beachcombing we were pretty hungry. One of the first things we came across was a Circle K convenience store. I got some sushi and Keenan got some noodles with meat. They even warmed his up for him. I also tried some sort of grape soda (it tasted like medicine, yuck!). My sushi was ok, one type was crab, cucumber and some sort of dried fish (maybe?) and lots of mayo. The other was crab with mayo and tiny fish roe. Neither one was too bad, it was just mentally weird eating sushi from a convenience store even though I knew it was fresh! 

The fences along the roads have designs painted on them

My Spiral Grape...yuck.
And a fancy plastic fork.

One of his favorite things about japan? Toothpicks everywhere!
This one was in the package with the chopsticks!

Garden next to the convenience store.

Here's the route we took back to Misawa from Shipwreck Beach, the extra marked point was an accidental detour from a wrong turn...oops!

After a day of adventuring we met up with a couple of Keenan's co-workers for dinner at an Indian Restaurant. We'd never had Indian food before, and we both really liked it. Ankur was the restaurant and it is right outside the Main Gate of base.
After dinner we went to a bar called Red Note to listen to the house jazz band play. One of Keenan's co-workers plays sax in the band. It was a couple stories up in a building and had a total of 5 or 6 tables in the entire place. Our drinks were around $7 each and there was a $3 cover, but we did get free pistachios. We'll have to be cautious and plan ahead if we are going to be drinking, the legal limit to drive here is only 0.025, compared with the US 0.08. More than one drink and we'll be calling a cab which is $20-$30 to only go a couple miles...

My meal at Ankur, left to right, nan, tandoori chicken leg,
rice, cabbage salad and chicken curry. I also had hot milk tea.

Here's our collection of sea glass from our day at Shipwreck Beach.