2/23/14 Report - New Side Scan Sonar, Diggers, Medallion Find & Cargo Lost to Big Waves

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Metal Detector Find.

Here is a shallow water detector find.  Do you know what organization this comes from?

It reads, To thine own self be true.  And, Unity, Service, Recovery.  That is a pretty good hint.

It is about the size of a silver dollar.

I'll show you the other side and give you the answer below.


While the calm weather on the Treasure Coast has been a pain in the ankle for beach detectorists, the guys down in the Keys are getting extra opportunities to hunt this winter. 

The crew of the Dare, as part of the Fisher salvage efforts in the Keys on the Atocha and Margarita, got some new equipment.  Side-scan transducers were mounted on the hull.  This sonar does not require the usual "fish" owed by a cable.  That means she can collect data anytime she is going.  They are planning on working the area around where the gold chalice was found on the Margarita site.  I showed a scatter plot of this wreck not long ago.

Of course one of the most important determinants of detecting success is being at a good site.  You can't find much if it just isn't there.  That is obvious enough, but I was reminded how important that is when I watched a few shows of the Diggers Saturday.  I guess National Geographic was showing Diggers all day.  Anyhow, all of the sites I saw them detect were sites of known historic importance.  They were civil war battlefields and all sorts of things. That is at least half of the battle.

A new series of Diggers is beginning Tuesday.

At the end of many shows they showed the archaeologists or museum curators their finds.  Most of us don't have access to to well-known archaeological sites, but the they did because of the TV program.

Flakes of Iron.

One person recently found these three items on the Treasure Coast.  There have been a lot of them on the Treasure Coast beaches lately.

The reason I am showing them is because one of the questions that I get asked the most is about pieces like these.  People wonder what they are.  If you are walking the beach and see one, before you look at it closely it can look very much like a cob.  Unfortunately there are many flakes of iron like this to be found all along the Treasure Coast.  You can see many of them along the water line some days.  They can be from various sources, but there are a lot of them where the beaches have been renourished.  All of those big pipes and the equipment used during beach renourishment causes a lot of them.

Back two or three decades ago, Douglas and John Brooks beaches used to have a lot of iron flakes.  There was a barge that was used in salvage operations that rusted away.  That produced many of the flakes that were found on those beaches.  They are not so prevalent there these days.

Anyhow, so many people ask about iron flakes like this that I thought I would post a few pictures and give the answer here.  

As far as I know there is no way to know which ones are really old or where they came from.  Therefore they are just flakes of iron. 


Here is the other side of the object shown above.

This side reads, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change.  Courage to change the things I can.  And wisdom to know the difference.


Great advice!  

See the AA in the middle.  That stands for alcoholics anonymous.


As I was watching Diggers yesterday I was also reminded how much the significance of interesting finds depends upon what you can learn about them and where they came from and how they ended up where they did.  (More on that in another post coming soon.)

Figuring out the source of finds not only helps you appreciate those finds more, but it also helps you to find more.  That is especially true when finding artifacts, and less important when picking up coins or jewelry.


I'll also post more on beach movement and how coins and things get distributed on a beach.  I spent a lot of time on my last post on beach dynamics.  It takes a while to make that kind of information clear.

On the Treasure Coast we still have a small surf.  That is good for water hunting, but not detecting treasure beaches.  

Maybe I'll show some more gold water finds tomorrow or soon.

They are still having huge waves on the other side of the Atlantic.  One cargo ship lost a lot of containers off of coast of France.  Not all were full.

Here is that link.

http://www.english.rfi.fr/economy/20140221-denmarks-maersk-sued-after-losing-517-containers-french-coast

I remember some times when ships lost cargo off of the coast here and people were running around picking up whatever was washing in.  One time is was wood furniture.



Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net