Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Beach Metal Detector Find. |
This is the time of year when people tend to look back and then ahead. It is good for detectorists to look back. You can learn some things that way.
What did you find this year? What did you want to find that you didn't? What things did you find a lot of, and what things did you surprisingly not find?
There is the matter of luck to be taken into account, but overall and in the long term, it is more a matter of what you did or didn't do. Take time to stop and consider your goals and what you did and didn't accomplish. Review what you found. And what you didn't find.
Here is a good example. If you found a good number of big gold rings but no small gold rings, there is probably a reason. When I first started detecting I found a lot of men's rings but few women's rings. I thought the reason was that women didn't lose as many rings as men. I later learned that with my detector and the settings I was using, I was missing a lot of the smaller rings.
That is the type of thing I'm talking about. Evaluate your finds and see what that might tell you. Maybe there is something that you might need to change.
Another example would be if you find a lot of shipwreck spikes but no cobs. Think about why that might be? I'd say there is a good chance that it is either because of where you are spending your detecting time or how you use your detector. More often than not they are found in different areas. Or it could be that you are hunting an area near a shipwreck, but that particular shipwreck might be a shipwreck that had no treasure or that had been thoroughly salvaged. There could be other reasons too, but the point is to notice what you are or are not finding and think about the possible reasons.
It helps a have good detailed records. If you can look and see exactly what you found, when and where, that will help. I still occasionally regret not keeping detailed enough records at times. Every once in a while I think of a find and wish that I had better records on where it was found.
It also helps if you have a number of finds. It is hard to draw good conclusions from little data. The more data you have the more you will be able to learn from it.
Take some time to look back on last year and see what you can learn from it. And make up your mind to keep good records next year.
Yesterday I showed a photo of some finds that John B. sent in. Did you figure out if they were real or fake. They were fake. I hope you looked them over real good.
If you've dug old shipwreck artifacts containing a black stone, you might not know what the stone is. It is not always onyx. I'll tell you more about that in the future. I'll also go over some of the highlights of this blog for the year 2012.
On the Treasure Coast, the wind was mostly from the north today and the surf was about two feet with a swell up to about 4 or 4.5 feet.
Sand has been accumulating on already sandy beaches. There are some shells and fossils accumulating in the low tide area on some beaches - mostly small.
Conditions for finding old items on the beach remain poor.
With the chilly air and short days not too many people are lounging on the beaches either. It isn't easy to be productive out there right now.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
