Great Silver Bar Sold at Sedwick Coins Internet-Only Auction.
Just look at all of those great markings!
The auction concluded yesterday and this bar sold for over $46,000 (not counting the buyer's premium). Nice bar and nice price.
The final prices for all lots sold are now available for inspection on the Sedwick Coins web site.
It is always instructive to browse artifacts, and especially interesting when you can see actual prices.
I recently received a photo of a knife that was found along the Treasure Coast. It didn't appear to me to be either Spanish or over 100 years old. I'm not an expert though and didn't personally inspect the knife. But there is more than Spanish treasure on the Treasure Coast and some items, as I've said before, are what I call signal finds.
Signal finds are finds that may or not have any significant economic value, but they have another type of value - informational. They provide information and provide a signal.
Even though the knife in my opinion was not centuries old, it was obviously not new and obviously not a recent drop. It looked like it had been out there for quite a while.
That to me sends up a signal. The find is a sign that people were in that area in the past, and there are probably more things to be found there. That information can be more valuable than a find that does have economic value. That signal would be all I need to justify investing additional time and effort in searching that area more thoroughly and looking for additional clues.
Remember, not all treasure is Spanish and not all treasure is hundreds of years old. There are many other types of treasures that have been found on the Treasure Coast.
There were the English, French, Seminoles, Ais, pirates, pioneers and more recent criminal gangs. Don't think that Spanish shipwreck treasure is the only treasure worth hunting on the Treasure Coast.
The knife I was talking about above was found in a mangrove area. A lot of people only hunt on the beach. That means you have a good chance of finding unhunted ground and possibly new treasures when you hunt off-beach.
My main point here is when you find a signal clue like that knife in an off-beach area, it would be a good idea to intensify your efforts in that area. It will almost always be interesting and could result in the recovery of a cache.
On the topic of knives, there is a large collector market for vintage and antique knives. I like to find different types of knives. If a knife is in decent shape, it will probably be easy to sell. Dive knives, for one example, sell very easily. So do vintage pen knives.
Since knives are so collectible, there are some good web sites for researching vintage and antique knives.
Here is the link to one.
http://www.worldknives.com/catalog.php
In addition to the large catalog to browse, that site also has a lot of good technical articles. You'll find some listed at the end of the catalog.
Here is another good vintage knife web site. Notice the prices.
http://www.jaysknives.com/antiqueknives.htm
Added 10:56 AM: I wanted to remind you of the club hunt being held by the new St. Lucie Treasure Hunting Club this Sunday. Contact twiprod001@att.net.
Also I can't help but respond to what some politicians are saying this morning about a downgrade in US debt and the resulting interest rates being like a tax on all Americans.
They don't seem to want to tell you how printing more money to pay for the debt and the resulting inflation is like a tax on all Americans. It just takes the money out of your back pocket so you don't notice it so much. You get the same number of dollars but they are worth less. The result is the same. Very sneaky.
Treasure Coast Beach Forecast and Conditions.
It seems like the tropics are becoming more active. Tropical Storm Don seems about ready to hit Texas. And there is a new tropical wave in the South Atlantic still a good distance from us. This one looks like it will develop, but it is too early to guess where it might go. I'll keep you up to date on its development.
There were scattered showers along the coast this morning.
The seas are still running around two feet. It looks like that will continue for several days. Therefore, no change in beach hunting conditions yet.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
