The Best Beach Bag

I’ve worked for Wirecutter for nearly a decade in various capacities, writing about everything from travel backpacks to camping stoves to luggage to road-trip gear to car-camping tents.

• I currently live on the North Shore of Oahu and spend a large amount of time at the beach working on our guide to the best beach and surf gear.
• I deploy our beach-tote picks to transport all the other gear I’m testing to and from the beach. I also use them for non-work-related surf and swim outings.
• This guide builds on earlier, excellent work by Eve O’Neill, who tested tote bags on the beaches of Northern California.

The L.L.Bean Boat and Tote is made in Maine of heavyweight, 24-ounce canvas, which helps it weather the elements (though it isn’t water-resistant) and allows it to stand up like a bucket even when empty. In this bag, your valuables will stay hidden from prying eyes as well as protected from sand and splashes. It features a reinforced bottom and overlapped, double-stitched seams made with nylon thread, which will resist rot better than cheap cotton thread.

The Boat and Tote comes in four sizes—small, medium, large, and extra large—and each size gives you two options for the handle length. The large bag we tested, which measures 15 by 17 by 75 inches and holds about 35 liters, shipped with that size’s standard 8-inch handles, long enough to fit over a shoulder and freeing up your hands to carry umbrellas and coolers. But it’s a tight fit; if you plan on stuffing your bag to the brim, opt for the longer, 14-inch handles to accommodate the bulk. They extend all the way around the bottom of the bag and are rated to hold 500 pounds.

The bag has no additional pockets and no zippers, but that isn’t a bad thing. Pockets fill with sand. And as Wirecutter founder Brian Lam discovered after trying—and casting aside—six different zippered bags, zippers, unless specifically designed for salt-heavy environments, oxidize and seize up quickly in ocean air. (But if you still demand closure, the Boat and Tote is also available with a zippered top.) This bag is protected by L.L.Bean’s somewhat limited satisfaction guarantee for a year.

The Yeti Camino 35 Carryall is constructed from the same material that made our best waterproof duffle pick such an obvious recommendation. The trademarked Thickskin shell is a high-density nylon coated in thick, waterproof materials that shed water and grime—it feels somewhat like a Wellington rain boot, except it’s more malleable. The bottom is made through EVA foam injection molding, which is a fancy way of saying that this bag will stand upright even while empty, so it’s easy to load and unload.

Although the Camino 35 Carryall is a touch larger than our top pick—it measures 15.2 by 18.1 by 9.8 inches—its capacity is about the same, at 35 liters. Two interior pockets are sealed with zippers, which aren’t ideal in sandy situations, but the bag also has two dividers, one at either end, that can create open pockets.

We’ve been somewhat skeptical about Yeti equipment in the past. Not that the quality is poor or that it fails to live up to the hype, but we’ve always thought there was a premium attached to the name. That said, after years of testing Yeti gear, we can’t deny how long-lasting and tough it almost always is. If you’re hard on your gear, or if you tend toward more-adventurous outings, this may be a bag to consider.

While canvas is a better bag material for most beachgoers, a mesh bag is a great option for holding dirty or wet things. We like the Saltwater Canvas Whale Bag because it’s made of porous mesh, not canvas (despite the company’s name). Filthy beach buckets and shovels can’t ruin it, sand shakes out easily and can’t get stuck in crevices, and pool toys such as snorkels and goggles can go in wet and stay there to dry. If the bag gets funky, you can just hose it down.

Measuring 15 by 12.5 by 15 inches, the Whale Bag has nine exterior pockets to hold an assortment of flip-flops, sunglasses, and water bottles—the things that children (and maybe you) tend to scatter around and forget. Note that a small amount of sand can come in through the bottom, which means this bag is not ideal for holding electronics, but should you need to secure a few valuables, it does have one interior zippered pocket plus a small carabiner key ring. It comes in a wide variety of colors, and Saltwater Canvas also sells two smaller sizes: the Dolphin and the Minnow.

Sometimes you need a bag large enough to carry the whole family’s stuff within. That’s the Cotopaxi Allpa 60L Gear Hauler Tote. Measuring 14 by 20 by 14 inches and capable of holding 60 liters, it’s just about as large as one person can comfortably handle. The tote has three interior pockets: One is zippered, but the other two are open and made of mesh, which should make it easier to empty out any sand that may creep in.

This bag seems expressly designed for family outings, though Cotopaxi’s marketing depicts people on far-flung adventures carrying it while hopping in and out of boats and the like (probably not advisable with an open-top tote bag, but we digress). The point is, the bag is built well enough for such adventures, even if most people are more likely to use it to gather up beach toys and wet towels.

Cotopaxi, as a registered B-corp, is also transparent about its social and environmental impact and safe labor practices, all things we appreciate. And Cotopaxi backs the Allpa 60L Gear Hauler Tote with its thorough repair, replace, or credit lifetime warranty—though we doubt you’ll need to use it right away, considering how well made the gear usually is.

If the Cotopaxi Allpa 60L Gear Hauler Tote isn’t available: Consider the very similar (in fact, nearly interchangeable) Patagonia Black Hole Gear Tote 61L. Patagonia, like Cotopaxi, is famously transparent about its environmental impact, and it also backs its goods with a lifetime repair-or-replace warranty. For the beach specifically, we preferred the inner mesh organizer pockets within the Allpa tote and the louder, beachier colors that Cotopaxi usually chooses for its gear. But those are mere quibbles, and you’d likely be happy with either choice.

Here’s what we looked for when we decided which bags to test:

• Durable, opaque material: We wanted a tote sturdy enough to survive the trip to the beach (being dragged in and out of a car trunk, being schlepped on a train), as well as hours of exposure to sun and wind and the occasional splash of saltwater. We also wanted a bag that could discreetly shield any valuables from covetous eyes; the exceptions were the mesh bags we decided to test for families who might be hauling wet beach toys, fins, snorkels, and the like.
• Sturdy, sewn-on handles: We didn’t want any risk of the handles giving way under a heavy load. We also wanted handles long enough for us to sling the tote over a shoulder.
• Reinforced, rigid bottom: A bag should be able to stand on its own so that sand doesn’t creep in, which typically happens if the bag is lying on its side. A lot of the nylon and polyester options we considered didn’t have a rigid enough bottom.
• Capacity of 35 liters: We calculated that a tote of that size would be large enough to hold towels, water bottles, and snacks for two people.
• Nylon stitching: Cotton thread will rot.
• Colorfast dyes: The tote bag will inevitably get wet, and we wouldn’t want to worry about it staining the towel it’s sitting on—or our car’s upholstery.
• Few or no zippers: In our experience, sand and saltwater have played havoc with zippers. We avoided bags that had a top zipper closure.

Our testing plan involved packing each tote with all our beach stuff and taking it to the beach. We assessed how easy each bag was to carry across the sand and how steadily it stood upright when we put it down. We also got the bags a little wet to see whether they would dry out in a reasonable amount of time—and to confirm that their dyes wouldn’t run.

Lands’ End Natural 5 Pocket Open Top Canvas Tote Bag: Compared with our top pick from L.L.Bean, this bag is made of similarly sturdy materials and is just as nicely constructed, but we passed on it because its four interior pockets, while convenient for day-to-day organization, are likely to trap sand at the beach. Also, its handles extend only partway down to the reinforced bottom, whereas the L.L.Bean tote’s handles go all the way around.

Other canvas bags: Knockoffs of our picks proliferate on Amazon. If you were to compare any of them with the real L.L.Bean Boat and Tote, it would be no contest. The quality suffers in all the places you might expect: The fabric is cheap, and little attention has been given to the design of the handles. (The bag we initially tested is no longer to be found on Amazon, but the poor-quality dupes continue.)

Getagadget Huge See-Thru Mesh Beach Tote Bag: At a mere 4 inches wide, the bottom of this mesh bag is so narrow that it has no hope of remaining upright on its own, so you risk spilling your food and clean clothes into the sand.

This article was edited by Christine Ryan.