Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Treasure Coast Beach This Morning. |
This is what the beach looked like this morning. There is still sand accumulating on the front beaches.
The surf was calm, there were however some surfable waves.
Notice anything about that beach? No people! And I'm showing one of the busiest beaches along a twenty mile stretch.
I heard one South Florida guy whining about all the competition down there. There is a reason there are a lot of detectorists down there. There are tons of people that lose good things down there. Even a monkey will quit pulling the a if he never gets anything for it. If you have enough people in the water wearing good stuff - especially active people or people not accustomed to or prepared for the water - there are always some recent drops to be found. It doesn't take much skill to do that.
Here is a quick video clip showing the surf on the Treasure Coast today.
Most all of the people I did see on the beach this morning were kids trying to learn to surf, along with a few fishermen.
Just noting the differences. You always have to analyze the situation and make adjustments.
Below are a couple of my small finds this morning. Both are the type of thing that will slip right through the holes in your scoop.
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Two Very Small Jewelry Finds Made This Morning
At The Beach Shown Above. |
If you don't know what you are doing, you can waste a lot of time trying to scoop up small items like that.
It is important to first get a good estimate of size and depth. Familiarity with your detector and testing can help with that.
Once you have pinpointed the item and know about how deep it should be, put the point of your scoop right behind it and try not to dig any deeper than necessary. Try to get the scoop just deep enough to get the scoop under the target and no more.
I've talked about recovery techniques for deep targets and won't get into that again now.
Good visibility can help with targets like this. Watch the sand as your scoop comes up. Watch for any sign of the object as your raise the scoop. You might see it fall out or off to the side. Don't get too much sand in the scoop. If it slides through the hole quickly and you have good visibility, give the sand a toss to the side and watch for any glint from the object on the surface of the sand.
A snorkel mask can be helpful. Also, very small targets can often be found by feel if the sand doesn't have shells and the sand is pretty stable on the bottom.
In the wet sand today, there was a couple inches of fine sand over top of a layer of shells on the front beach.
In the shallow water, the wave period was long. I think you'll see that when you watch the video. The wave would break and then come in over the sand in the shallow water, hit the beach, and then flow back out, so the current would come in over the sand and a few seconds later back out again. The result was that the top sand in the shallow water would move a little one way and then the other.
I won't get in to other details about how that affects using your scoop. Some other time maybe.
Sometimes its easier in deeper water, For one thing you sometimes don't get as much current on the bottom in deeper water.
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I received a couple of great emails last night. They were jam packed with good information.
Here is the first. It is from S. W.
There are a couple of original copies of "War in Florida" on ebay. They are going for about $1200.00. There are not too many books that cover the Seminole War. Mostly a page or two in an old book here or there. Did you know one of the main reasons for the Second Seminole War was because the whites would not let the Indians take their slaves west with them and would not pay them for them when left behind. I have one of the best private collections of antique books from the war of 1812 through the Mexican War. Things from this era are not easy to find and are getting out of my price range. ...
I've always liked old books myself. The market for old books has changed a lot in the past decade or so. Before old books were as available on the internet as they are today, you could easily sell almost any book that was near a hundred. Now most old books sell for very little if at all, however there are books that do bring higher prices, like the one S. W. mentioned.
I once was asked by a librarian at one of the local state colleges to look at a private collection that was once donated to them. They were going to discard all of those books. There were some very nice and valuable books in the collection, including things like a Mark Twain first edition, many 19th century books, and even an 18th century book. They had no idea what they had. I told them those books should be saved.
On the topic of books, here is a rare one. A copy of The Hobbit (shown above) was recently sold at auction by Sotheby's for 137,000 British pounds, which would be around 200,000 U. S. dollars.
There are very very few fiction books worth that amount. Most old books are not first editions and most authors do not have a cult following like Tolkien.
Old non-fiction books can be valuable. They can be valuable sources of information.
It is fortunate we can access as many as we can for free on the internet
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Too me, old books, both fiction and non-fiction are loved collectibles.
The issue about the Seminoles owning slaves is very interesting to me because I hadn't heard anything about that until very recently. Maybe I just missed it somehow, but it seems to me that we usually get a sanitized white-washed politically correct version of history in many modern history books and in our schools. Only part of the story is told. That is one reason why it is good to go back and read books that were written by the people that were closer to the actual events. They have their own perspective, biases, etc. but seeing how they looked at things and wrote about them adds something. Even the old style of language adds another dimension.
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Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
