Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
I've written about a couple of Florida cache finds this year. Caches are found, but not real often.
Hunting for a cache is different than hunting for individual coins or pieces of jewelry, and a lot of what you read about how to find a cache is wrong.
The first thing about cache hunting, is you have to have reason to be looking for one. If you just go out and cover a lot of ground, you might eventually find one, but the odds are very long against it.
Caches are rare, so it helps if you have reason to believe there might be one. Of course if you are hunting the right kind of place, for example a historic home site, you should be aware that there is always the possibility of a cache being present. If you don't want to miss any possible caches, you want to alert to a variety of types of targets that you otherwise might discriminate out.
If you read most articles about cache hunting, you'll probably read about things like two-box detectors for detecting really deep targets. For many caches, a regular detector will work just fine if you aren't using too much discrimination. The idea that every cache is going to be buried ten feet deep just isn't true. People don't have to dig down ten feet to hide a cache. There are other things that will hide a cache as well or better than a few feet of earth.
Someone who buries a cache, will usually hide it where they think they can find it again. That means that the cache will be near landmarks or features - perhaps a tree, wall, fence or walk. That can cause a problem for the detectorist. They will not be able to detect the area well either because of physical obstacles, like walls, or noise from rebar or buried cables. You can't detect with a two-box detector in small areas or around other big metal items.
The caches that I'm most familiar with were buried in canning jars, not treasure chests. One cache was distributed around a home site with individual jars placed in different areas. And each jar contained different kinds of coins. You don't know what the container might be so you don't want to discriminate iron or a lot of other metals
If you've been hunting very long, you can probably easily tell the difference between a small surface target and a deeper large target from the sound of the signal. You can't pay too much attention to your meter. Many caches will give mixed signals because there can be signals from the container as well as the coins or whatever else is in the container. They can be quite a mixed bag.
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A very dark two carat emerald was discovered on 7/11/18 while the Magruder was working Emerald City.
The Magruder will be going back to the site of the Margarita to dig the virgin area on the northern trail near where the gold chalice was found years ago. They will be using an airlift to excavate holes in the bedrock.
The Margruder was finding Ming Dynasty blue and white porcelain and olive jar shards on the Atocha site.
The Fisher organization will also be returning to the deep target site with Dolores.
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I think it is amazing how little coins have changed over the past thousand years. I guess they were well-designed for the job and worked well. Mostly flat and round with designs on two sides. It is fairly obvious what works well about that.
Anyway, I think coins will be going away before long. Canada quit producing the-one cent coin in 2012.
Keys had a long run too, and are disappearing.
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We had a nice west wind this morning, but there are no storms around, and the surf is only one to two feet.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
