Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| John Brooks Beach Front This Morning Near Low Tide |
I took a look at a couple of beaches this morning. John Brooks was real sandy. There was a steep front and a bunch of sand piled up on the beach front.
The other beach wasn't one of the major shipwreck beaches, but it was slightly better. There was a small cut - less than a foot high but maybe forty yards long.
There were a few targets in front of the cut, including clad coins, EOs, small pieces of copper sheathing, and junk. The EOs were deep. I didn't dig all of them.
So conditions were generally not good, but there seemed to be a few spots where there was enough to entertain yourself for a while.
You might be able to find a few more cuts if you look around enough.
Don't expect anything more than about a three foot surf for the next week or two. We could use a nice winter storm. It isn't too late yet.
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| One Small Cut Found This Morning. |
You might be able to find a few more cuts if you look around enough.
Don't expect anything more than about a three foot surf for the next week or two. We could use a nice winter storm. It isn't too late yet.
Some things in life require a certain level of knowledge, skill or maturity. You won't want to take calculus before you take algebra. You don't want to face major league pitching while you are in Little League. And you wouldn't be prepared to start a family or join the military at age 14. You just wouldn't be ready.
You might have heard it said that it is never too late, but I know for certain that sometimes it is too soon. That can apply to a lot of things, but right now I'm talking about finds.
Some finds can be very special in unanticipated ways. It can take years to find out how special they are, and then sometimes it definitely can be too late.
Some finds are once-in-a-lifetime finds. You might not know that at the time, and you might not find that out until much later. When you find something too soon, it can seem like it is no big deal and you think you will surely find more of them later. But as the years go by and you never see another one, you learn that it isn't that easy and that the find was actually much more rare than it seemed. As your experience level increases, your knowledge and appreciation of the object increases too.
Maybe you didn't realize how special the object was, and how unlikely it was that it would survive for centuries. Maybe you didn't appreciate how unlikely it was that you would be at that specific spot at just the right time to find that rare and lonely survivor.
I've found a few items like that. I didn't realize how fragile one special object was. Now it is hard for me to believe that it could survive on an ocean beach for a few years, let alone hundreds. I didn't appreciate that at the time. I didn't appreciate how unlikely it was that I would would see that rare item when it was uncovered at the edge of the water after hundreds of people had searched that and the other beaches thousands of times. I've never heard or read of another being found - certainly not on a beach.
I realized just last evening that there are some things that you shouldn't find too soon. There are some things that you might not be ready to find. You might not be adequately prepared. You might not even recognize the item when you see it. You might pick it up an throw it away as junk. You might not know how to take care of it and preserve it. If you find it before you are prepared, the item might be ignored, rejected or destroyed. You certainly won't appreciate it like you should.
I can think of several things that I found too soon. It now seems that a few of those were probably once-in-a-lifetime finds.
Not long ago I did a post explaining some of my mistakes and regrets. In that post I described several of my mistakes and regrets. As it turns out, most of those were because I made a find too soon. I just wasn't ready for them.
There is no way you can be prepared for anything and everything. You can be somewhat prepared to be surprised though. Treat items with extreme respect and caution, especially when the find is something that you haven't found or researched before.
You can prepare yourself to some extent by reading and researching. The more of that you do, the better off you will be.
Most detectorists want to know what is the best detector and where to hunt. They want to know how to find things. The kinds of mistakes that I'm talking about today, though, are mostly made after you get the signal or after you uncover the item.
There are some rare and special, even once-in-a-lifetime finds, that do not require quite as much care and caution. A gold coin, for example, is easy to recognize, will be appreciated even if not completely identified, and it doesn't require much cleaning or conservation. There are definitely mistakes you can make with that kind of find, but at least it is durable and obvious from first sight that you should take care o it. There are other kinds of finds that require more caution or study. Some require a lot. If you make one of those kinds of finds, I hope you are prepared for the moment.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
