Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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22K Gold Find by Terry S.
Photos by Terry S.
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Terry Shannon found this 22K gold item Sunday. Here is how he described the find.
I was detecting by a very large cut. The ground was very hard almost like gravel with a lot of small stones and shells. After you broke through that the sand was a grey color but pure sand that I believe is the original sand. I had the sensitivity on my detector turned way up and was going very slow scrubbing my coil right over the sand. This was down at least 20 inches and was really just a weak blip and I decided to dig it.
The hole is punched rather than drilled.
The following photo shows the thin layers or sheets.
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| Closer View Showing Layers or Sheets. |
Terry has some ideas about this item, as do I, but he wanted to get any thoughts you may have about the item and what it might be. I don't want to influence you so won't give our ideas yet. Let me know what you think.
To put the item in context, here are some other recent finds made by Terry along the same stretch of beach.
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Lead Sheathing, Another Small Item And A Sounding Weight.
Photo by Terry S.
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That sounding weight is a great find and might give up some more clues.
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Two More Views of the Sounding Weight
Photos by Terr yS.
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Terry mentioned a couple interesting facts about ssounding weights.
In addition to their use in determining the depth of water under the bow these sounding weights also had a hollowed out area on the bottom. A wad of tallow was usually put in there to bring up part of the bottom sediment ( sand, pebbles, clay, shells ) and if it came up clean it meant the bottom was rock....
These [sounding weights] are usually found on the wrecks itself by divers so I think it’s pretty neat. Now for an interesting piece of history passed on to me by my friend Chris from Jacksonville. On the Mississippi River in the 1850’s, the leadsmen also used old-fashioned words for some of the numbers while taking soundings, for example instead of two they would say twain. Thus when the depth was two fathoms, they would call by the mark twain. The American writer Mark Twain, a former river pilot took his pen name from this cry...
Great finds Terry! Thanks for sharing.
I'll going to continue with this tomorrow.
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Maybe one of the most important things that I should have added yesterday is what got me started doing the blog. I started it shortly after my dad became ill, and I had a lot of things that kept me from getting out to detect. Writing about it helped some when I couldn't get out very much. In the past ten or more years I've only spent about one percent of the time in the field that I would have liked to. It has been a variety of things. Maybe yet.
I also should say how helpful the hospice care people were, and thanks to them!
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I'll plan to pick up tomorrow with some more on Terry's finds.
Let me know your thoughts.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
