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Liza Thornton (l-r), Joan Lorne, Darlene Duggan, Ginny Cairo, Sally Willis and Lydia Weis spend hours on the beach collecting discarded bottle caps to turn into art, such as this octopus. Photos provided

By Ron Hayes

When she’s home in Colorado, Sally Willis walks the ski country’s hiking trails, picking up trash.

When she escapes to Gulf Stream every April and November, she walks the beach each morning, picking up seashells and glass.

That was the plan, anyway.

“When I was here in 2019, I was looking for shells and glass and not finding much, but I kept finding bottle tops and caps,” she says. “So, I kept them as my seashells.”

Five years later, Willis’s bottle cap collecting has become an annual tradition, and an art project.

That first year, she put the caps she’d found in a glass jar, posted a photo to Facebook, and invited her friends to guess the number of caps.

The winner guessed 577 caps. The answer was 578.

Just for fun.

A year later, the coronavirus pandemic kept her home in Colorado, but in November 2021 she was back on the beach, along with a king tide, which upped her bottle cap bounty quite a bit.

“I used them to make a Christmas tree mural in the sand by my house, took some pictures, and cleaned it up and threw everything away.”

By November 2022, she was friends with Joan Lorne, Joan’s daughter Jackie Kingston, and Darlene Duggan, turtle monitors with Kingston’s Sea Turtle Adventures.

“We’re both out in the mornings,” Lorne says. “Sally would be getting trash off the beach while we were monitoring turtle nests, so we became friends. She’s just a super cool gal.”

With her new friends helping that year, they used the caps to create a sea turtle in the sand.

“I usually do the mural the Sunday after Thanksgiving somewhere in front of our house,” Willis says.

In 2023, they fashioned a mermaid mural.

“Everybody contributes,” Willis says. “We start to make the outline in the sand and everybody puts their two cents in. It’s not me saying this is how we’re going to do it. I explain my vision and we work around that.”

If you walk the Gulf Stream beach about 7 a.m. most days during her visits, you would spot Willis with her 5-gallon Home Depot bucket. Mornings she heads south from her home near the Gulf Stream Golf Club, evenings she turns north.

“It’s just amazing,” she says. “You put the bucket down and pick up five to seven caps in a pile of seaweed, all coming in from those cruise ships out on the Gulf Stream.”

On Dec. 1, Sally and her team of sea turtle monitors opted for an octopus, which they dubbed “Sandipi.”

“We didn’t have quite enough caps to make it as dense as I would have liked,” she says, “but we made it work.”

Willis’s bottle cap art is still just for fun, not posterity.

“We usually pick it up within 24 hours, depending on the tide line,” she says. “If I think the high tide will take it away, we pick it up right after we have taken enough photos. If we can do it way up on the beach like we did this year, then we leave it for 24 hours. I don’t want those bottle caps to end up back in the ocean.”

And for the first time, the 1,751 bottle caps Willis and friends used to create Sandipi were not thrown away when she left for Colorado.

In addition to monitoring turtle nests, Joan Lorne is a teachers’ aide at St. Vincent Ferrer School in Delray Beach.

Students there will use the caps to create an artwork for Earth Day, which is April 22.

In Colorado, the trash Willis collects in plastic bags winds up in trash bins.

In Gulf Stream, her 5-gallon bucket full of bottle caps that became art will become an educational project at the local Catholic school.

Driving back to Colorado in December, Willis carried a sense of satisfaction along, but not too much.

“I feel good that I can clean up some of the trash, but it’s just for fun,” she says. “We talk about what we’re going to do for a mural this year, and what are we going to find on the beach that we can incorporate.

“I know what we’re going to do next Thanksgiving,” she adds. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

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