Onion rings with a side of sand? Produce washes up on several Hilton Head beaches
As a caterer, Roshael Arns is used to bringing food to the beach. This week, though, it seemed like the beach was trying to provide extra ingredients.
Arns is one of the owners of Board and Basket on Hilton Head. The business sets up luxurious beach picnics and offers catered grazing boards, picnic baskets and Lowcountry boils in area backyards.
Early Tuesday morning, she arrived at Folly Field Beach to walk her dog, Chanel West Coast, and they set out in the direction of Burke’s Beach, as they usually do.
“We have a boxer, and she’s got to get out and run,” Arns explained.
Their walk started out like any other, but then Arns noticed an onion along the surf line.
“I thought, ‘How weird, someone ate an onion on the beach,” she said. But things got weirder the farther along she walked.
She spotted another onion, then a whole head of garlic, then a lemon and even a brown egg.
“We probably came across 50 onions,” she said.
She was so entertained that she posted on a local Facebook group about her finds.
“Lemons, garlic cloves and SO MANY onions,” she posted. “Kind of fun to wonder where they washed up from. It’s like an Easter egg hunt ... but with onions!”
One person replied to the post saying she picked up about five pounds of onions on Singleton Beach that same morning. Others reported onion sightings in Palmetto Dunes, in the Shipyard area and at Driessen Beach as well.
Shore Beach Service operations manager Mike Wagner said lifeguards found a mix of produce on Hilton Head’s beaches over the last several days.
He said this type of event, where items that aren’t supposed to be in the water wash up, is rare but not unprecedented. He recalled the beaches being dotted with foam pellets in years past.
It’s more likely for a beachgoer to encounter jellyfish or sea pork. In 2017, after Hurricane Irma, Hilton Head Islanders were captivated by a big red buoy that washed ashore.
So where does Wagner think these onions came from?
“Just pure speculation would be off some kind of boat or container ship,” Wagner said.
A spokesperson for the Georgia Ports Authority said on Wednesday that the agency had no information about this type of cargo going missing or about a vessel having trouble offshore.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that there are no reports of it.
Wherever the onions came from, they offered a welcome bit of levity for Arns, whose family’s home on the north end of Hilton Head burned and was a total loss late last week.
“It kind of made us laugh,” she said. “It was a good time to find onions.”
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 2:46 PM.
