Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Four Reale After Cleaning and A Little Polishing. |
I cleaned that cob some more, and you can see above how it looks now. I'm done with the Muriatic acid. The encrustation has been removed, and I did just a little shining with a baking soda paste.
The details can be seen much better now. I'm pretty sure that it is a Phillip V and dates to between 1700 and 1715.
Below is a close-up like the one I showed just a few days ago when I was not done with the cleaning. If you compare this photo with the one I posted the other day, you'll see how much of the encrustation and foreign particles have been removed by soaking in Muriatic acid. You can also see how the high areas that have been shined actually look like silver now.
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| Close-up View of Part of the Same Four-Reale. |
I also stumbled onto something else that might be helpful. If you want to get a better look at the design before you are done cleaning it, you can use some wet baking soda spread thinly across the surface of the cob to bring out the design, as shown below.
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Same Four-Reale With Baking
Soda Bringing Out the Detail.
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With just the naked eye I could see the details of the design probably better than I could see it with magnification but without the contrasting white substance. I was really surprised by how much it helped. I took the above photo with a regular digital camera. I probably should have used magnification so you could see the effect even better.
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Steve and Paulette M. sent the following email and photos take yesterday (2/3) and commented on Bonsteel where the cliff in front of the dunes is about six feet high. Below is the photo and email.
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| Bonsteel Park 2/3 Photo by Steve and Paulette M. |
Today we were looking at different beach accesses north of Fort Pierce and we started at Indialantic and went South to Turtle trails. Not much good looking erosion anywhere. We went to Bonsteel knowing 3 weeks ago they dumped sand and bulldozed it a quarter mile north and south about 6 feet thick. Today it was just about all gone. Just a thin slice at the dune. Beach was wider, but not too much. Steve and Paulette M.
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| Bonsteel Park 2/3 Photo by Steve and Paulette M. |
Yesterday I posted a link to an article that discussed a method of monitoring long term beach trends of accretion and erosion. You'll find that it provides some interesting clues.
Long term trends are obviously important to the treasure hunter. A beach that has been building for decades will have a lot of sand covering up many of the kinds of things you would most be ooking for. It can take a lot more to uncover treasure at a beach that has a lot of accumulated sand.
A beach that has generally been eroding over the years and decades, on the other hand, will give you a much better chance. Although it will vary one way and then the other on a shorter term basis, it won't take as much to uncover the old stuff.
One Treasure Coast beach that was very productive back in the 80s and 90s has been much less productive in the past few years due primarily to frequent renourishment programs to the north and littoral drift.
The sand dumped by renourishment projects will generally eroded much faster than sand that has naturally accumulated. For one thing it is out of place. No matter how many hundreds of yards is renourished, it will normally be bordered by areas were the sand has been depleted. That makes the renourished areas more vulnerable.
No matter how often they dump sand at places like the beach south of the jetty at Fort Pierce, it will erode very quickly because of the interruption of sand caused by the inlet and jetty.
If a beach has been generally eroding over a period of time, new sand dumped on the area will not normally last long very long, but has a slightly better chance if it is dumped during the spring or summer when at least the short term trend is more favorable. Of course a strong storm could change all of that.
One thing to keep track of is the long term trend of the beach. Has it been eroding, building or staying about the same? The bottom line is that a beach that has been eroding over the years will tend to become productive more easily and frequently than one that has been building over a long period of time.
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The surf is small and the tides are small. In a few days the surf is predicted to increase up to 2 or 3 feet, but that isn't very much either.
Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net