Developing approaches to determine the modes of transport and weathering of mafic detrital minerals in natural sedimentary environments is critical to our understanding of sediment production, dispersal and provenance, as well as carbon capture under natural and enhanced weathering regimes. We integrated the characterization of morphological and surface textures with the surface composition of recent detrital clinopyroxene grains concentrated in a sandy coastal area from the western North Island of New Zealand and a rocky shore area of Santa Maria Island in the Azores Archipelago. Using the compactness shape descriptor, 341 grains were subdivided into elongated, elongated angular, euhedral, angular and subangular groups, with each group further characterized using morphological and microtextural indicators of abrasion, breakage and dissolution/chemical weathering. In both studied environments, the clinopyroxenes are dominated by elongated to angular shapes with flat cleavage surfaces and conchoidal fractures. This is consistent with dominant subaqueous transport by rivers and longshore currents for New Zealand, and dominant wave action with limited sediment supply by rivers along the rocky shore of Santa Maria. More abundant subabraded and abraded shapes with bulbous and elongated depression microtextures are observed in New Zealand, which indicates additional effects by eolian transport that are not seen in Santa Maria. Consistent with semi-quantitiave EDS spot analyses that document fresh clinopyroxenes surfaces, chemical weathering textures are very rare to absent. In Santa Maria, sampling of recent beach sand was complemented by ~125 kyr-old paleobeach clinopyroxenes, but these yielded similar textural results without evidence for chemical weathering. However, the surface of these older clinopyroxenes includes small adhering smectite (typically <50 µm in width and a few µm in thickness) interpreted to reflect incipient cementation with buffering of acidic fluids by more reactive glassy lithics in the deposits. The lack of chemical weathering but pervasive evidence for mechanical breakage of clinopyroxenes indicate that, at the sand size, these minerals break faster than they dissolve due to frequent subaqueous and/or aeolian reworking in the studied high-energy environments.