Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Partially Cleaned Dug Coin |
One small thing that originally made me think it was a fake treasure coin when I first saw it was a very shiny gold colored spot, which I thought could be the remains of some gold plating. That isn't what it was at all.
There was a spot of gold colored encrustation that looked very much like gold. Pretty amazing. It really fooled me until I looked at it under magnification. And it turns out that that gold spot was right on top of the date and prevented me from seeing the date.
It really helped when I finally could see the letters PTAS and the number 100.
After I could tell that the coin was a Spanish 100 Pesetas coin, I was able to find pictures and details on the exact coin.
A little internet research revealed that the dug coin is a silver bullion coin containing .489 Troy ounces of silver. So it is worth a few bucks after all.
And here is a link from Dan B. showing what it is.
http://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1885.mobile.html
And another link.
http://www.coininvestdirect.com/wiki/100-pesetas-silver-coin/
You can see what it really looks like in those links.
So it turns out that the coin is not a fake, is Spanish, and is silver, but not real old. How it came to be in that location with a bunch of US coins of similar date is anyone's guess. I haven't cleaned all the coins that I presume to be US yet, so there might be another surprise or two.
Part of an old shipwreck recently washed up onto Cumberland Island GA. Here is the link.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/20/cumberland-island-shipwreck_n_2516676.html
Here is a little video clip showing one Treasure Coast treasure beach as I found it Tuesday morning.
Saturday this beach had some cuts. By Monday it had pretty much filled in again, but by Tuesday morning it had cut again.
What I found Tuesday morning was that there were new cuts closer to the water than the remains of the previous cuts at that one beach. That made the steps you see here. This steps were all along the beach. The new cuts were from nothing up to about 4.5 feet.
The sand in front of the lower step was more firm than the soft beach front that I found Monday.
Another beach that I saw Tuesday morning had no cuts at all.
Although we have some new cuts like this, it is not enough to significantly improve the probability of finding old shipwreck cobs on the beach.
Tuesday afternoon, the wind increased and the waves increased some. There may be some additional erosion from that. I'm not expecting much though. The surf is predicted to be in the area of 2 - 3 feet. That normally won't improve beach detecting conditions much. It looks to me like the sea might actually get a little rougher than what is predicted.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
[After this post I got the coin cleaned almost like new and a few more surprises were in store. I'll have that for you tomorrow.]
