55 Pounds of Coke? Six Other Things Found on Galveston Beaches, Ranked from Worst to Best

Whales, gold rings, messages in bottle, coke

​A jogger found 55 pounds of cocaine on the beach in Galveston this morning, a bigger haul than the 37 pounds someone else found there a year ago.

In both cases, they turned it over to the cops instead of going all low-rent Breaking Bad. Of course, if anyone decided to take the latter route, you wouldn't hear about it.

A huge amount of wrapped cocaine is not the only thing that's been found on Galveston beaches fairly recently. Sometimes the discoveries are good; sometimes not so much.

Here are six, ranked from worst to first:

6. A body
The body of a drowned teenager washed up on East Beach as summer began, a tragedy we don't want to think about.

5. A pygmy sperm whale
A kid was looking for seashells on the West End this February when he saw a pygmy sperm whale stranded on the shoreline. Although authorities tried to nurse the whale back to health, they had to euthanize it: The whale was too injured to be released back to the sea, and rescued pygmy sperm whales essentially cannot live in captivity. Among other things, they need to deep-dive to a degree facilities can't handle.

The hunt for tar balls

​4. Tar balls
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, gulf beaches everywhere looked frantically for tar balls. While beaches along the eastern Gulf of Mexico got hit, Galveston pretty much escaped. Until one day a very few tar balls were seen, and the beaches were immediately swamped by TV crews and reporters breathlessly reporting on not very many tar balls.

3. A gold ring
Yes, sometimes those metal-detector dudes get lucky. And sometimes they make eight-minute videos about their big finds.