Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| One Ton Gold Coin Created By the Perth Mint Source: http://www.perthmint.com.au/1-tonne-gold-coin.aspx |
The Perth Mint created this one ton gold coin. It is 99.99% pure gold and has a face value of one million Australian Dollars.
One Australian dollar is worth close to 90 US cents.
I never particularly liked detecting with the crowds and when given the choice would select the less populous areas. Certainly the popular spots have a lot of people and a lot of targets, but they also generally draw a lot of detectorists who thin out the targets. It isn't the thinning out of targets that bothers me so much, because there are still a lot of targets left, I just prefer the solitude and finding older things, and also finding out where things used to be.
You might be surprised how many old abandoned and hidden beaches there are to be discovered. Things change over time. The landscape changes and the popular spots change.
In metropolitan areas, the popular areas sometimes become run down and the crowds move. That doesn't mean you can't still find a lot where the in-crowd used to congregate, especially when conditions are good and the older objects become accessible.
In the days of segregation there were "colored beaches in many communities. I've mentioned colored beaches at least once or twice before. They weren't the best beaches. Sometimes they were rocky or muddy or something. But people congregated there in great numbers. And when segregation ended some deteriorated even more and were abandoned.
I've detected some of those beaches, and as you would expect you don't find expensive jewelry on those beaches, but you do find a lot of silver coins from the era. And you also find a few (very few) more modern items on top of the older items, and sometimes even some nice items from even earlier days deeper down.
Don't forget that beaches can change again and again, and that can happen quickly in urban areas due to the amount of human activity. A beach might have been a very nice area before it deteriorated.
Some abandoned beaches are just around the bend from a beach that is now heavily used. I discovered beaches that look like they were never used as beaches but which were evidently the place to be in times past. It is not uncommon for such beaches to be overgrown with grass. Maybe the sand has been covered by silt or mud, yet if you detect there you'll find plenty of good targets, and that might be your first indication that is where the people gathered back in the day.
There are other things to look for. Look for the remains of old structures, maybe an old rotting pole or two that was once part of a gate to a parking area. Look for the remains of old groins or breakwaters.
Old paths and dirt roads become hard packed. They might be over grown and hard to see now, but if you look carefully you can often see the remains of an old path. Some now lead to out-of-the-way gay or nude beaches.
One place that I often hunted whenever the beach eroded had a packed surface that was once evidently a parking area or road up to the edge of the beach. It only showed when the sand eroded. Coins from the 1800s and 1900s were found there as well as jewelry from several decades.
As I think over those old abandoned beaches that I've hunted, I wish that I took photos of them. Some were in parks. Some were on bays or ocean beaches, some on lakes or ponds, and some were in the swamps.
Some were overgrown with grass. Some were mostly eroded away. One was over a coral outcropping that is usually covered with sand. One was at the site of an old burned down hotel site.
Many of those old abandoned beaches may have been discovered, but since there is little or no daily replenishment of surface targets like at the more crowded areas, they are often overlooked by most detectorists. Even those that have been discovered and detected, can continue to produce a lot of good targets, especially when there is additional erosion.
On the Treasure Coast we now have a one to two foot surf. Out a week or so is predicted a five to eight foot surf.
If you've been following this blog very long you know that when a big surf is predicted a week or more in advance, more likely than not it never happens. Maybe this will be the exception.
I just looked and they already decreased that prediction.
Sorry. I'm still trying to get my video clip on how sand and objects move to load.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
