Emerald & Gold From a Treasure Beach.Yesterday was one of those days. I didn't know what I wanted to talk about and it seemed that everything I tried to do didn't work. The camera memory was full, then the battery needed recharged, and on and on. Finally I gave up and decided that I'd just wait until another day for my next post. Usually I just sit down, know what I want to talk about and do it. Well yesterday it wasn't working.
I did run across some good research materials about Pedro Menendez and his activities along what the Treasure Coast area. The article is by Eugene Lyons and was published in the Tequesta under the title of The Florida Mutineers, 1566-1567.
Here is some of what I learned.
In 1565 Pedro Menendez took the French fort at Cape Canaveral "and then marched southward along the beaches to Ays." Captain Juan Velez, who with two hundred men and fifty French Prisoners waited a month at Ays for supplies to arrive. A mutiny occurred and a hundred men left and walked south along the beach until they reached an inlet that was too wide to swim. Eugene Lyons conjectured that this inlet might be the St Lucie River.
Later Velez discovered another port further south and moved the whole garrison there. There they built a fort which they called Santa Lucia, where they were continually attacked by the Jeaga Indians. Some sources put this site near the Jupiter Inlet and others at the St. Lucie inlet.
Here is the link if you want to read the entire article for yourself.
http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1984/84_1_04.pdf
Or for a concise timeline with some different opinions on some details, see the following.
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/histarch/menendez.htm
The most productive beach and water hunting depends heavily on the movement of sand. That is especially true when you are looking for older items or accumulations of items. When you are hunting what I call recent drops, the movement of sand doesn't matter much.
The dry sand or back-beach area does not change often, but it does change when there are unusually high waves or tides. The front beach or wet sand area changes often, but not as much as the area that is continually underwater and constantly affected by waves, tides and currents.
If you want to increase your finds, learn to hunt out the hot spots where the water has sifted, sorted and gathered items according to density and other physical characteristics.
When you find a hot spot, settle down, detect slow and get every last item.
Many hot spots will be in the water, but not all. I've found 15 rings in a four hour period in a wet sand area. The key is to locate the hot spots.
While it is easier to hunt the dry sand area, and there are times to do that, you can often be more productive by taking advantage of what the moving water will do for you - either underwater or in the wet sand after the tide has receded. The more water action you have in an area, the better the chances are of finding a real hot spot.
The wet sand areas work pretty much the same as the underwater areas except the water action is generally more consistent and therefore effective.
If you focus on finding hot spots, you'll want a detector that will work well no matter where the hot spot is found. Since the back beach, front beach and underwater areas all require something a little different from a detector, you might want to have a good general purpose detector that will function in all of those areas fairly well.
Some detectors that work fine in the dry sand do not work so well in the wet sand. And of course some are not made to be submerged. Dry sand is, of course, the easiest to work in some ways, but usually does not offer the advantage of items being sifted and sorted, and therefore junk is often intermingled with more valuable targets.
Everybody knows about the pirate, or privateer, Henry Morgan. Well archaeologists have found a cannon thought to be from his ship.
Here is the link to more of that story.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/team-including-texas-state-professor-recovers-cannons-thought-1335660.html
Good article.
Did you know that Moammar Qadaffi has 143 tons of gold stored away in Libya? Whooeee!
The price of metals has been doing well lately too. Some are saying that metals prices will continue to rise.
Forecast and Conditions.
Conditions are not good for finding cobs on the Treasure Coast. Beach conditions haven't changed much for weeks, or months actually. And the sand just continues to build.
The wind is out of the west today and the seas are very calm. There are a lot of shell piles out there. Good time to be in the water (where allowed).
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
