1/10/16 Report - More January Treasure Coast Finds. Importance of Adjusting Your Detector Stem. Salvage of CSS Georgia.

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

Steve L. said, I love reading your posts and check for new ones daily.  I am new to detecting as of June 2015 but was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time early December...  I wanted to share my finds with you, six lead balls a full small nail and part of a larger one.  Thanks for all your help and I look forward to more finds in the future.    

Finds and photo by Stever L.

Thanks for sharing Steve.  Nice finds!  You did well to find shipwreck items on the beach so soon after beginning detecting.

There were reports of many musket balls, shot and other lead items being found.

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This might seem like a small thing but it can make a big difference.  Adjust the length of your detector stem very carefully.  A lot of new detectorists have the stem too short and as a result their coil is too high off the ground.  An inch or two can make a big difference.  Someone emailed me about this not too long ago.

Also, if your stem is too you very well might tend to lean forward as you try to keep your coil close to the ground.  When you do that you'll get tired much more quickly.

Make the necessary adjustments so that you can maintain good posture and keep the coil as close to the ground as possible.

More frequent adjustments might be necessary when you are working uneven ground or working on a slope.

Take a minute to check your stem length.  You might be surprised how much of a difference it might make.

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Here is an excerpt from a story about the salvage of the CSS Georgia, a confederate gunship.

...More than half of the haul retrieved during the $14 million government project, however, was of a much more mundane nature: nuts, bolts, washers, bent iron rails and other material that did not shed any new light on the lives of sailors serving aboard the vessel.

Altogether, 16,697 artifacts weighing a total of 135 tons were returned to a watery grave at the bottom of the Savannah River, said Jim Jobling, project manager for the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, which is tasked with cataloging, cleaning and preserving artifacts from the Civil War shipwreck.

"Anything I considered to be unique, I would say, 'I want this, I want this,'" Jobling said. "I picked through everything. No unique stuff went back in the river."...

I found this article both interesting and telling.

Here is the link for the rest of the article.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/half-artifacts-confederate-gunship-returned-river-36047145

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Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

6/10/11 Report - Your Best Detector Settings & Erosion on Treasure Coast

One Nice Size Cut on One Treasure Coast Beach This Morning.

This cut was about six foot high, which was as high as any I saw this morning.

See video of this beach below.

Yesterday my post was about being up to my arm pit in muck. I understand that a lot of you would like to see that. I should have taken a video, but I don't have enough hands. Usually I'm holding a scoop and detector or I am up to my arm pits in muck, which doesn't make it easy to film the comical scene. About all I would get is the sky, the bottom of my foot or some other less flattering part of my anatomy.


Recently an old church from the 1700s was redicscoverd in St. Augustine when some old recrods were found and analysed.

Here is the link to that story.

http://www.alligator.org/news/campus/article_719ce626-90cc-11e0-a59b-001cc4c002e0.html


Someone asked how I got ivory out of the beach fossil that I showed in the video yesterday. Actually I didn't. I don't know what it is, and where I said ivory I used the wrong word. What I was really thinking and should have said is enamel. I was thinking of the enamel bands that are on tusks such as those of the gomphothere as shown on page 310 of Hulbert's book, The Fossil Vertebrates of Florida.

It might not be a piece of an enamel band either. I'm thinking wood now, butreally don't know.

That is one of the good things about writing a blog. If you make a mistake, someone will point it out. That helps.

I don't spend a great deal of time on these posts and sometimes I write like I was thinking out loud. If I did put a lot of time into proofing and checking everything I say, there wouldn't be nearly as many posts.

I really don't know much about fossils other than what I've learned myself over the past couple of years from the fossils that I've personally found and subsequently researched. This one didn't look like any of the ones that I have become familiar with, and I don't know what it is yet. Over time I will find out what it is and in the process learn a lot about what it is and also about some things that it is not.

If you know what it is, I'd like to hear from you.


Talking about self-education, I was out scouting around on the beaches this morning and learning more about a detector that I haven't used too much. I like experimenting, especially with detectors.

Just the other day I was reading in a forum where someone was asking what settings to use on a particular detector and the discussion that followed. My advice is to not pay too much attention to what other people say about things like that. It might give you a starting point, but then go and test it out and find the settings that are best for your particular detector on the beaches that you actually hunt.

If you aren't sure about what settings to use on your detector or if you simply want to optimize your settings, take some test targets to the beach and try the different settings t see which provides the best results.

The beach that I visited today was ideal for testing. There was a broad relatively flat beach where you could easily test your settings in dry sand, wet sand and shallow moving water.

First I'd recommend just throwing out a coin on the surface of the beach. Swing your coil repeatedly over the coin, change the sensitivity settings and observe the change in signal. Find the setting that gives the loudest clearest signal. Then adjust the threshold and other settings to get the best signal. Play around with your settings like that until you find the best combination.

You can do the same thing moving to the wet sand, and then into the shallow moving water.

For some detectors the optimal setting will not change much for the different zones of the beach.

After you are comfortable with the settings that you obtained using a surface coin, bury a coin and test your settings. Just dig a hole and put the coin in it and cover it up. Repeat the test and adjustments until you get the best signal you can from the most deeply buried target.

Note: A newly buried target will not necessarily give as good a signal as one that has been buried for a while, and where you bury it will also determine how deeply it can be detected. If you bury a coin in shells you usually won't be able to detect it as deep as a coin buried in densely packed salt-water saturated sand.

If you ask me, doing this is much better than using the preset settings or the settings that you read or heard.

Another note: Don't always go for maximum sensitivity. When increasing the sensitivity causes an erratic threshold, you might get a signal but the signal could easily be disguised and lost in all of the noise.


I took sometime to play with my sensitivity and threshold settings today. With the detector I was using, increasing the sensitivity beyond a certain point resulted in an erratic threshold sound and more noise which off-set the effect of the increased sensitivity. I personally like a smooth threshold so I can really catch those marginal whisper signals.

I'd say that one important thing that many people do not do enough, is use test targets and play with their detector's settings.


Treasure Coast Beach Forecast and Conditions.

Here is a video showing one beach where I found some nice erosion this morning. In a way it almost looked like a winter beach, but that was superficially.

Here is the link for the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1ScNFMBqtY

Notice the erosion, and notice how the sand had been pulled down and extended the front beach.

On other beaches that I saw this morning, but did not detect, there were dips in front of the beach. I didn't have time to check them out.

On this beach there were a good number clad coins between the slope and front beach. I'll define that better for you some other time - probably tomorrow.

The erosion on this beach has been a slow process that has been accumulating for a few days. I mentioned a few days ago that there were some slight erosion. This is one of those spots and it evidently eroded a little more last night.

Unlike this beach, most of the other beaches I saw this morning were covered with sea weed, indicating that the sand was building on those beaches.


I think that is it for today.

Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net