4/15/14 Report - Key and Ring Find, Keys From the Margarita, Portuguese Man-O-War & Beach Conditions

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



Treasure Coast Beach Around Low Tide This Afternoon.

I went out to look at a couple of beaches this afternoon.  Here is a photo of the first, that as you can see, had a little cutting and also a little scalloping.

The cuts here were less than two feet at the highest.  What is worse, is that the sand in front had filled up to the cuts and was mushy.

You can see how there were some scattered shells along in front of the cut.  I didn't bother detecting here.



Same Beach Just a Little South.

This is the same beach, this time looking from the flat beach towards the water and out over a dip.  Maybe you can see where the dip is in the middle of the picture.  Here it was more scalloped than cut. 

I went to one other beach and it was less cut and scalloped than this one.  It also had scattered shells and was very mushy along the water line.

There were targets at the second beach near the water line, although not things like coins -  pieces of copper and stuff like that.  Also there were some larger items that couldn't be recovered because they were deep and close to the water.

Portuguese Man-O-War

I saw a couple of these.  They normally show up seasonally.   They were pretty big and capable of delivering a good sting.

The stinging tentacles can be feet long.   I've got some good stings from those while in the water.  Try to avoid them.  When there are a lot of them in the water you might want to wear a wet suit or something.

Meat tenderizer seems to be a good thing to apply to affected areas to reduce the pain.  I've heard of other people who use other applications.  Some apply alcohol, but I haven't found that to be very effective.

Key and Ring.
Finds and photo by Dan B.

Here are a couple of finds from Dan B, and here is what he said.

At the top of the broken one, it says Allegheny, and is stamped in the middle with the number 16 and says County PA on the bottom. Not sure how old the key is, and the ring was found at the beach and appears to be modern. Go At Pro. Found two of these with low sensitivity just to reduce interference's from deeper objects.



The key is modern but it got me thinking that since there are a lot of keys found, you might want to be able to recognize older keys.   As a start I'll show some 17th Century keys from the Margarita, which sank in 1622.

The keys found from the Margarita and Atocha mostly look very much like those shown in the picture below, which is one of many pictures of keys from the Margarita and Atocha shown in the Mel Fisher artifact database.

Here is the source link for the picture of the keys. http://www.melfisherartifacts.com/

Keys From the Margarita.
Source: Mel Fisher artifact database.

Tomorrow on the Treasure Coast the surf is supposed to be a bit bigger - up around four to six feet.  Also the high tide will be pretty high.  


I'm still not expecting much improvement in detecting conditions although we might have a few hours of North winds on Wednesday.   There is a lot of sand that needs to be moved.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net