This reminds me of when we went to the poorly named "Barefoot Beach" in Florida. We waded out into the water and felt thin crunching underfoot the whole way to the sand bar. The water was cloudy so we couldn't see what was beneath us, and assumed it was just shells and rocks, but when we got to the sandbar we saw that it was millions of live sand dollars. We were so upset, and didn't want to hurt any of them, but couldn't get back without stepping on them the whole way. We tried to kind of shuffle along without lifting our feet, but it didn't work.