By MADDY VITALE
Some would-be treasure hunters found different kinds of shells on Sea Isle City’s beach this week — shell casings, possibly dating back to World War II.
Melissa Edwards took a walk along the beach in the Townsends Inlet section with her children Tuesday and came across not one, but two shell casings that may be from the WWII era.
At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, around the 80th Street beach, her 9-year-old son, Bryce, found the first one.
Then on the same day, in the afternoon, her 6-year-old twins, Finn and Will, discovered the other shell casing.
“They saw it come up with a wave. It looked like gold,” Edwards recalled.
Edwards, who has a vacation home in Sea Isle, said her family was so excited by the discoveries.
“The boys tend to find the most interesting stuff. I didn’t expect two relics in one day,” she said of the shell casings in a phone interview Thursday. “The boys showed their (school) class virtually.”
The shell casings were empty, she noted.
“That was a fun day for them,” Edwards said. “The experience of being in nature and discovering and taking a break from the digital world is good for them.”
She took to a Facebook forum Tuesday to declare the find: “Found today on beach — 1942 Frankford Arsenal Philadelphia bullet casing.”
Edwards snapped a few pictures of the shell casings.
“We want to do some research on them,” she explained.
A fellow Facebook forum member, Sandy Leradi, responded to Edwards’ post on Tuesday. “We found three this morning on a beach walk! Around 40th,” Leradi wrote of the shell casings she discovered.
While it couldn’t be confirmed that the shell casings are from WWII, former Sea Isle mayor and local historian Mike McHale said the finds could very well be from the 1940s or ’50s.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in partnership with the city, conducted a beach replenishment project this summer that could have uncovered the artifacts, McHale speculated.
He said the dredging equipment used to pump sand from the ocean onto the beaches have a cage installed to catch things such as shell casings.
However, he noted, sometimes things get through.
“At one point, there were all kinds of shells that filled the whole beach. That is when the Army Corps put a cage on the dredging equipment to collect seashells, munitions and other things,” McHale said. “The cage is supposed to catch all of that, but sometimes things get through.”
In his decade-long tenure as a former lifeguard for the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol, he said he never found shell casings on the beaches.
“I don’t remember seeing munitions. But I do remember hearing stories from other people who found them,” he recalled.
On Thursday, Daniel Nope posted on the same Facebook forum as Edwards that he also found a shell casing.
Other posters responded.
Greg Randall said, “Third one of those I’ve seen posted since the dredging.”
Trent Smith gave his opinion in the forum.
“WWII, probably February 1942. There were many battles off of the Jersey Shore, many of sunken ships right off the Sea Isle area, German subs were sinking ships up and down the Jersey shorelines.”
