Tuesday, May 14, 2013

5/14/13 Report - Pot Shards, Diamond Ring, Salvage Ship & More Detecting Records


Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasure beachesreport.blogspot.com.


Treasure Salvage Boat at Dock in Fort Pierce Sunday.


We got some heavy rain on some of the beaches Sunday.  It didn't last too long in most places though.  And some areas just got a little rain.  Yesterday was rain free where I was.

By the mouth of Taylor Creek is a good place to see some wild life.  I saw an otter, manatee and porpoise.


And yesterday the low tide got down pretty good.  And the surf was low too - down around one foot, expected to increase a little but not much through the day today.

A couple of days ago I told you about how I found some of my old metal detecting records.  At the top of the first page I looked at the records of one unusually good hunt in which 10 pieces of gold were found in one four-hour hunt. 

As I recall over $20 of quarters were found in the same 4 hours, but that doesn't appear on the records because I quite keeping track of clads by that time.

As you know, in recent posts I've been pointing you to an informative book on the Calusa.  Well, coincidentally or not, the Miami Herald interviewed the author of that book, who is the curator of natural history in Gainseville, and published an interesting article on the Calusa today. 

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/13/3394628/calusa-indians-dominated-our-coast.html

You'll find some interesting history in that article.

Thanks to L. B. for sending me the link.



After going through those old metal detecting records a little more, I found where I had written the year in the left margin.  It was 1988.  I'm sort of glad I found that because although I figured it was some time in the eighties I didn't know that for sure. 

After looking some more at those records I found another unusually good day, but I was not using my favorite modified Nautilus 571 then but rather my Fisher 1280 Aquanaut.  I looks like it wasn't long after that that I purchased my Nautilus. 

Anyhow I see in my records that day 5 gold, 5 silver, and what I thought were 5 plated rings were found.   As I said before I did not know in those days that 14KP meant 14K plumb, not 14K plated, so some of those rings that I counted as plated might not have been.  I don't know if some of those were mistaken or if I acid tested them before making the entry.  In either case, that was a pretty good day.  And that shows you can do pretty well with a stock off-the-shelf-detector once you know how to properly use it. 

There was a time when I ran too much discrimination on the 1280 before I learned how much that caused me to miss smaller gold items. (As you probably know if you've been reading this blog, I generally don't use any discrimination now. The Nautilus didn't have any discrimination at all except for nulling on iron.)

I now remember that day pretty well too.  The day when the ten pieces of gold were found using the Nautilus was in the shallow water.  This 5, 5, 5 day was in the wet sand, and I was using the Fisher.  I didn't record and don't now how many coins were in that line. 

There was a cut and a big coin line.  (If you are not familiar with that terminology, you might want to search back through this blog to see how I define a coin line.)  I worked the coin line for two hours before I had to leave to go pick up my wife from work.  Since I was doing so well and knew that I hadn't finished cleaning out the line, I returned and worked it for two more hours. 

If you do keep records and go over them years in the future, you'll remember a lot of the details of various hunts.  When I read my records, the more I think about it the more I remember of that day.



They have a variety of Atocha coins for sale in the gift store at the Fort Pierce City Marina.  I think most were mounted in one way or another.   And they had Fisher paperwork with them. 

From the few that I could see the prices on, the prices didn't look too bad.  For my taste they were too shiny.   

They also had some of those fake pirate coins for sale. 



A diamond ring worth $22 thousand was accidently flushed down the toilet and retrieved after a lot of pumping and sifting.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/video/Woman-flushes-22K-diamond-ring-down-toilet/29945923811/Comcast/TopVideoClips/?cid=hero_sf

Again, a lot of treasures have some sort of dragon to guard them.  But sometimes if your lucky he'll be sleeping.


Tomorrow I'm going to show you a very nice collection of shipwreck spikes found by one of this blog's readers.


Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net