Loved this beach. Started at Venice Beach. No shark teeth, no people. Not a great place llike we heard. Drove to Caspersen Beach and thought we were in heaven! Felt like a separate island in the middle of nowhere! Found so many shark teeth - lovely beach, sand was dark. Just had an amazing time and will be back!

Caspersen beach park is located about a quarter mile south of the Venice fishing pier on Harbor Drive, which is about a 5 minute drive from Venice Avenue. It is a very quiet beach and there are no houses or or other buildings located anywhere near the beach. Parking is free and there are clean public restrooms and water fountains. There is a boardwalk along the beach for a short distance and plenty of vegetation. At the south end of the boardwalk, the beach stretches as far as the eye can see. There are no homes or buildings to be seen. The sand is generally a light gray, with patches of nearly black sand near the water. This is caused by the presence of fossilized material mixed in with the sand and shell. As another commenter mentioned, this beach, along with most of the Venice, Florida beaches are great places to look for fossilized sharks teeth. This beach is very quiet and rarely gets crowded. The sand is quite soft, unlike the firmer, whiter beaches to the north on Siesta Key. The water tends not to be as clear here as on some beaches and it drops off a bit more quickly than most. Another attraction to this beach is that during the months of May through July, lots of sea turtles lay their eggs here. You can see the nests marked by wooden stakes and yellow tape, and sometimes covered by chicken wire to fend off the raccoons. You may even see the turtles tracks coming up out of the water, looking very much like a bulldozer track. See Caspersen and Venice Beach photos at www.beachhunter.net/venice.htm. Caspersen beach does have a lot of vegetation and woods above the beach, so on a still summer day, insects can sometimes be a problem. If you are visiting in the summer, bring your insect repellent AND sun block.

. . . well, this isn't a beach for swimming. Not that you CAN'T swim; the water's great. But what you go here for is the shark teeth. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bona-fide 'Discovery-Channel' kind of nerd. And, being a three-hour drive to the beach that has one of the biggest fossilized shark tooth deposits in the world, I wanted to check it out. It's kind of a bummer that the rest of the beaches along this little stretch of the shore, in an effort to restore the beaches' eroding sands, buried the fossil-rich original sands under fresh, new sand. But Caspersen Beach was left largely untouched, and shark teeth hunters can scoop up the sands in search of tiny little black teeth of ancient sharks. With ample parking, bathroom facilities and a shower, it's a fairly comfortable beach. And incredibly clean, too: out of the several hours I've spent there, the only bits of trash I found were two cigarette butts and two trading cards. It's the first beach that I've actually felt comfortable taking my shoes off at and running around (I haven't been to many, but the ones that I HAVE been to, well, *yuck*.) Most people out there had sifters to dig into the sand; one man had a scuba mask on, crawling along in the shallow water; but, you'll be just as sucessful in finding teeth by just scooping it up in your hands. It's not just shark teeth; there's a WEALTH of shells of all sorts. And, if looking at little curiousities isn't your thing, you can sunbathe, go fishing, or take a swim in the Gulf waters (getting a tan and swimming in clear-blue waters in mid-October is something I'll gladly get used to!). I made it out with a plastic bagful of shells and 40 shark teeth and fragments (most were actually pretty nice, albeit small, specimens). And a pretty decent tan.