When did I first play Animal Crossing? Good question, it was back in the days of the Nintendo DS, I had a book filled with cheat codes and guides to a whole myriad of different games, and right there, at the beginning of the alphabetically arranged encyclopaedia of how-to’s, was a guide to every bug and fish and golden tool the game had to offer. I poured over this list religiously until my parent’s caved and bought me Animal Crossing Wild World. I played that game for hours upon hours, and my white whale, an Iguanodon Torso, evaded my collection for eons.
That’s right, the game had fossils, every day you’d be able to hunt around and find 3 new spots to dig up. Your character would loftily hold a little pebble with a star and an ammonite on, and you’d get it examined by an owl with a fear for insects. Ammonites became a staple of my understanding of the world, as text books, films, and encyclopaedias all used this helix shape to depict the notion of an eternity ago. 100 million years – can you imagine that? No, you can’t, our monkeybrains couldn’t possibly understand such a massive amount of time. And so, ammonites came to represent something pretty cool in my head.
I decided, for ✓ Project Bucket List, I’d tick a box off in the childlike wonder column of my life, and find myself a real fossil, out in the wild, not in a gift shop. When I first started speaking to people about the list, the fossil entry drew quite a few people in. My friend Clare, who is a mermaid, exclaimed confidently that I’d just have to go to Robin Hood’s Bay, and that if I went there around the 30th of August, we could time it with the pirate festival.
The Pirate Festival?
That’s right, I smoothed over the whole mermaid thing, but Clare is part of a massive community of people who dress up every year and descend on Whitby, dressed as pirates, red coats, mermaids and monsters to raise money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. And so, while looking for ways to find fossils, I found my way into an invitation to dress as a pirate for a weekend. More on that in a moment, if you stick around and read all about the rocks, I’ll give you a treat and show you photos.
Fast forward to the end of August, and Kymberley and I drove up to Whitby, camping not too far from Robin Hood’s Bay. We were there for a long weekend, and as soon as we’d set up our tent, we headed down to the bay. Fossil hunting isn’t always obvious when you start out. You don’t really know what to look for. For example, a test. Can you find the fossil in this picture?
Could you find a fossil in the picture? Because I sure fucking couldn’t. We spent half an hour crawling over the rocks on the beach, before realising that we’d be better off googling what a fossil rock actually looks like. We found that many fossil hunters look for round smooth shaped rocks. Have a look on TikTok or something, go screw your algorithm up and get trapped on Geologytok or whatever they call it. You’ll find stacks of videos of people chiselling into perfectly round rocks, breaking them open to reveal perfect spirals.
We brought our trusty chisels with us and a small hammer, and got to work. It’s actually really hard to chisel a small rock, they slip and slide everywhere, and when you don’t even know if you have the right types of rocks, it’s disheartening to have the focus of your attention slip off into a rockpool – ammonite dreams shattered.
We split up, casting our eyes over rocks here and there. In the distance, we heard hammers meet chisel as other, more skilled fossil hunters, picked their way through the beach. Then, on one of my many combs, I found a rock with an interesting pattern on. I’d learnt enough through our muddy-handed googling to know that patterns on rocks are a good sign, and thus, we had our benchmark.
We were looking for shale. They’re these dark, flaky, hunks of rock that’re made up of squished up clay, mud and silt. It’ll form over millions of years, and because it contains mud, dead animals and plants get buried and slowly but surely turned into fossils.
At a certain point, you realise that chiselling is for those with more patience, and who haven’t had a 4 hour drive and need to go to the chippy. And so, a new form of fossil hunting was born. I’ve coined the following name: “lobbing the shit out o a hunk of rock into the ground.”
Yeah, sure, laugh all you want, it’s not the most perfect technique, and I’m 90% sure that we lost a few fossils along the way, but look. Look what we found!
Now, to the untrained eye, this just looks like a little bit of rock. But you’ll actually find that it’s a very special rock, in that it’s a bit of petrified wood. (I think). Same way the animals got stuck down in the mud, it can also happen to sticks and branches, and thus, you end up with this very cool-sounding rock.
We looked around for quite a bit longer, and didn’t actually find any ammonites, which was the exact thing that I was looking for, so I can imagine we’ll try again another time. That being said, the elation at actually finding something that was a gazillion years old is something that nerds of any background will relate to.
Oh, and, look, you’re still here. Well in that case, let me show you some pirate photos. The day after fossil hunting, we headed over to Whitby itself. The night before, most of the pirate’s had got drunk and merry, so everybody was nursing a hangover by the time we arrived. The host at the campsite stopped us as she saw us getting ready in the morning, and asked if there was some sort of event going on. “You know, I thought that as well” I responded, in full pirate get up.
The event itself is something crazy to behold. Thousands upon thousands of pirates, all of whom give eachother a little nod of recognition. There were different bands and groups, numbers upon numbers of pirates dressed in purple, gangs of mermaids, redcoats roaming around looking to arrest troublemakers, and of course, the Pirate King, the winner of an auction, who wears a crown and hoists a flag for the weekend. Now, you may look at these pictures, and note that I’m not wearing a pirate hat, but am instead wearing a cowboy hat.
First of all, you’re not the only one, I got 3 “howdy’s” in public, which made me feel more powerful than a hundred lions, and second, back off, it looked cool, just let me have this.
Now, without ✓ Project Bucket List, no doubt I’d’ve eventually heard about the Whitby Pirate Festival, but I’m pretty damn certain that I’d never actually visit. I sound like a broken record, but making this list, and following through on it, gives more options and chances to experience life than you can plan for. The interesting thing is that, before starting the list, I’m pretty sure I would have found an excuse not to go, and that would have been that.
I adored Yes Man (2008), in which Jim Carey plays a man who’d grown stagnant in life, and decides to only ever say “yes” to it, as a remedy. Forget the fact that it gave 12-year-old me a crush for Zoe Deschanel – it left an impact when I realised that the more you say yes to life, the more you’ll enjoy it. This list has given me more chances to say yes. It’s the mindset behind it that’s opened up the chance to actually say it.
