Tuesday, January 28, 2014

1/28/14 Report - Low Tech Alternatives to Beach Detecting. Summer-like Beach Conditions. Surface Finds.


Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.



Summer-Like Beach With Shells and Sand Bar
As It Appeared Today.

I took a look at a couple of beaches today.  The beach looked like a summer beach.  The near continuous small surf and slight breeze from the Southeast has been piling up lots of sand.

Here is one beach.  This beach is a little different than most.  It has a sand bar out front.  The sand bar is made of renourishment sand that was washed off of the beach over the past few weeks.


This beach was renourished about a year ago.  Already the majority of that sand has washed back into the ocean.  You just can't expect renourishment sand to stay on the beach very long.

At the above beach there were a good number of shells, which I think you can see in the photo.  There were also numerous small pieces of broken fossils.  Also some pieces of sea glass.

I enjoy looking for things like that.  Native American relics also appear on this beach in good numbers.

Here is a quick video clip showing another sandy beach.





You can see how deep the foot prints are in this video.  That shows that the sand is really mushy.

Notice the small surf.

Beach detecting conditions are poor on the Treasure Coast, but if you are interested in shells, sea glass, or fossils, there are things to be found.


The Gasparilla Pirate Fest was held in Tampa on January 18.  I meant to mention that earlier but forgot.

Here is a link about that.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/its-time-to-get-your-gasparilla-bead-on/2162746

A Pirate Fest will be coming up soon in Fort Pierce.  More on that tomorrow.


Yesterday I was talking about cameras and photography.  I noticed this neat item that would be great for anyone who wants to make a video of whatever he is doing in the field.   You mount the camera on a tripod, put a transmitter on yourself, and the camera tracks you.   That would be handy if you want to make videos of yourself without a camera crew.

Here is the link.

https://soloshot.com/?utm_source=MSW&utm_medium=Forecast%20Pages&utm_campaign=116_MSW_ForecastPages_USA_GIF_Announce1_Home


When beach detecting conditions are poor there are a lot of alternatives.  Some don't even require a detector, such as hunting shells (some shells can be valuable), sea glass (which can often be sold for a small price) or other things.

You don't even have to go to the beach to do a little low-tech eye-balling.  I sometimes do what I call mucking around.  I've talked about that before.

Here are some examples of what I found on a short little walk I took yesterday other day without a detector.

Eye-balled Bottle

Ceramic Insulator and Maybe a Another Oil Lamp Top
One other thing found with these items was a Mr. PIBB soda bottle.  I don't believe I ever tried one of those.

While these things aren't valuable, they can be signs to point you to good detecting sites.

It is surprising what can be found just walking around.

There are interesting things being found off-beach now.   I'll report on a few more of those tomorrow. 


Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net