Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
The swells were three to five feet today. The wind was out of the west this morning. Low tide was around noon.
The swells will be decreasing the next few days, hitting a low of 1 -2 feet on Wednesday. That will give you a good chance to check out the low tide area after the big swells and high water that we have been having.
As I've been showing, there are both beaches that have eroded recently and others that haven't. Some of the more heavily eroded include Bathtub Beach and Jensen Beach. Here some that show little effect of our recent weather. These photos were all submitted by Trae R. Thanks Trae!
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| Rio Mar |
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| Bon Steel |
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| Turtle Trail
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I'm dropping my Treasure Coast Treasure Beach Detecting Conditions Rating back to a 1. Remember, as often say, my rating scale begins with a 1 instead of a 0 because there is always some chance of a cob popping up somewhere.
Yesterday I posted a photo of a spike that Philip found. Have you ever found a shipwreck spike? If not, there are several possible reasons. One might be that you use too much discrimination. You could be discriminating spikes and other artifacts.
As I've explained in the past, you can tell a lot about a target from the sound even when you hunt in all metals or pinpoint mode. With practice you can learn to pretty well tell the size, shape and depth of various objects. However, if you usually target a particular type of object such as coins or gold rings you can easily get into the habit of passing up odd shaped or larger targets. That could cause you to miss things like spikes and other artifacts.
I won't say there is never a time to use discrimination. You might well use discrimination when there are simply too many targets and don't have enough time to dig them all, for example. That happens.
I wonder if you would dig a large silver bar is you came across one, or a Rolex watch? I'll bet that a lot of people miss targets like that because they are looking for coins and rings.
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| Mystery Object One |
It is shaped something like a funnel, but not entirely. As you can see it is battered and encrusted and I don't know yet what the metal is. I'm not sure that it had an opening in the bottom. The bottom, or what would be the bottom if it were a funnel, ends bluntly.
The reason I bring up this object is that it gave a loud signal, - what you might call an overloaded signal - loud screeching. And of course I couldn't tell exactly what it was and was a little surprised when I dug it up.
The point is, if you want to dig artifacts, there is no way you can tell the various types of artifacts from the signal alone.
Here is another object that fooled me the other day. More from how it looked than the sound.
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| Recently Dug Object |
Let's see how observant you are.
When I dug it up I nearly tossed it in the junk bag. It had some sand on it and looked very much like a nut or washer or some type. As I nearly trashed it I halted, because the signal didn't sound like a nut or washer even though that is what it looked like to me at the time.
I thought it was a nut or washer when I looked at it, it didn't sound like a nut or washer, so I didn't put it in my trash bag but kept it to examine later. The whole thing is that the signal didn't match what I thought I was seeing.
If you noticed the little stone at the top of the item, you might have guessed it is a ring. And it is silver - heavily corroded silver.
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| Silver Ring With Stone. |
I trusted my signal more than my eyes in this case.
The point being, pay attention to your signals and get to know them. Practice with different types of objects to get to know what your detector is telling you. And when you dig up something that is new to you, run your detector over it several times and try to remember what it sounded like. Try to remember how your detector sounds for different types of materials, sizes and shapes at various depths.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
