6/28/18 Report - Context On Treasure Coast Cob Finds. Mexico Minted Half Reale. Arcadia Mills Archaeology Dig.

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

Mexico Minted Half Reale.

Let me put some things in context today.  Recently I've been showing some cob finds.  There were days when several were found.  That doesn't mean that it was typical to walk out on the beach and find that many.  I was living in the Fort Lauderdale area when I started hunting the Treasure Coast.  That means that I had to drive up to hunt without knowing what beach conditions were like on the Treasure Coast.  There was no Treasure Beaches Report.  In fact people didn't have the internet - or cell phones.  There are some advantages you have today with the new technologies, detectors and information sources.

There was no good way to know what beach conditions were like without going to the beach and taking a look.  For me that meant driving a couple of hours.  I would drive two hours often to find nothing but a crummy looking beach.  I made a lot of those trips before I ever found a single cob.  I was getting discouraged and didn't think that I would ever find one.

People tend to think that because there were days when several coins were found that it was always good in those days or that it was much easier.  You often hear people say that it has all been found or there isn't much left and it is much harder today.  I completely disagree with all of that.  It is very much the same now as it was thirty or forty years ago.  It wasn't easy back then, and it isn't easy today.  That is why I have so much to write about.

The one big thing that I think has changed is the frequency of beach renrouishment projects and the amount of sand being dumped on our beaches.  I do believe that has had an effect.  The dunes are protected and don't erode when they otherwise would if it weren't for the renourishment sand.  And the renourishment sand in the water protects the beaches to some extent.

Still, there are good days and bad days.  Some years are better than others.  And some decades are better than others.  Nature has the biggest effect.  There are times when you get a lot of rough weather and erosion.  There are also times when you get a lot of accretion.  Just like the normal winter and summer shifts.

Winter typically makes for better beach hunting than summer - other than tropical storms and hurricanes.  Sand tends to accumulate on the beaches in the summer and the rougher winter weather tends to strip it off.  I've long said that the best treasure beach hunting, with the exception of after good summer storms, is September to April.  And November to February is the peak for treasure beach hunting.  My records of finds confirms that.

There are both long term and short term trends.  There are days, months, and years when things either improve or deteriorate.  If you get a long-term trend of erosion in one area and then get a few good days on top of that long term trend, you have a real good shot.  The same few good days on top of a long-term trend of accretion or towards the end of a summer of southeast winds and accretion, won't likely produce much of anything.  A few additional feet of erosion on a beach that has already been losing sand will produce more finds than the same erosion after a few weeks, months or years of accretion. (For this discussion I'm not taking into account shallow water conditions.)

When you pile sand up in one place on the beach where nature was taking it away, it will erode faster than ever.  It creates a vicious circle.  Not all erosion is the same

I've never detected after the hurricanes that produced some of the best detecting and biggest finds.  I've missed those times when the hunting was at its absolute best.  For example in 2004, I had a lot of other responsibilities that were more important.

In the past few years beach hunting has been slow.  It is a combination of things.  There has been a lot of beach renourishment and the weather hasn't been helping either.  That is one trend, but it won't last forever.  You have to take a long term perspective.  Some times its hot and other times its not.

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Philip Monogram on Same Half Reale Shown Above.

This is the same half reales shown at the top of the post.  It is one of those that was not completely labeled so I don't know when it was found.

This one is on the thin side and has a lot of surface area.  It is pretty much as found and could use a little cleaning.  You can see some shells and crust.

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 ... “And, in excavating it, we found a big iron concretion, about fist size, with turtle shell fragments sitting on top of it,” said Walker, noting that they had the iron X-rayed in the UWF lab. “It looks like it’s a perfectly circular item, about 2 and a quarter inches wide in diameter.”

Walker believes the metal object could be associated with ritual or religious activity by the slaves. They expect to have a better idea in a few weeks, after conservation and cleaning in the electrolysis tank...

Here is the link for the entire article about the dig at the Arcadia Mill site.


http://wuwf.org/post/uwf-researchers-build-story-arcadia-mill-homestead-find-slave-cabin-chimney

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Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

5/1/18 Report - More On How Sand and Objects Move In The Water and On The Beach.

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

Tires In Indian River Lagoon.
( I pulled the vegetation-covered one out of the water. )

Hours, days, weeks, months, decades, centuries are all units of time that can be appropriate for describing beach sand cycles.   By "beach sand cycles" I mean the cycles of beach accretion and erosion on specific beaches.  Besides sand, other objects wash in and out in cycles of varying length.

A beach might erode for an hour, day or week before filling in again, but there are what I would call long-term and short-term cycles.  To give an example, Bathtub beach and Fort Pierce South Jetty beach will continue to erode for years, decades and even centuries.  There are stationary obstacles that cause the erosion, such as the rocks and houses in one case, and the jetty in the other case.  Despite the long term trend of erosion, there will also be shorter term cycles when the sand actually builds a little in those locations and then erodes back again.  So even though a beach might generally erode for a week or so, there can also be daily or hourly fluctuations.

But not only does the sand come and go in cycles, there are also periods of time when other objects, such as coins, come or go, and those periods are not perfectly correlated with the sand cycles.  I've explained why that is in the past.  I have been observing this lately in the Indian River Lagoon.

There is, believe it or not, a bit of a beach along the west side of the lagoon, and like other beaches, it comes and goes.  The waves do not get as high as they do on the ocean, but at times they reach a foot or more.  They usually hit the west bank of the lagoon.

I consider the beach along the west bank to provide a small scale model of an ocean beach, admitting that there are some differences - one being the average size of the waves and another being the tidal change of current.  As you probably know, the water flows into and out of the lagoon with the tides.

Since I drive up Indian River Drive frequently, I keep watch the lagoon to see what is happening there.  You might remember that I once said that the west bank of the lagoon was littered with a mass of bottles after the 2004 hurricanes.  There was a solid thick line of bottles along the west bank - some fairly old.  After the hurricanes, the erosion caused so much damage to the banks and Indian River Drive that they put sheets of connected concrete blocks along the west bank between Fort Pierce and Jensen to hold the banks in place.  That project must have taken about two years, as I recall.  After a few years ( I don't remember exactly how many ) the bottles disappeared.  The source of many of the bottles was also cut off.  Many came from the banks where people used to discard their garbage before the days of garbage collection, but the banks and anything on the banks was now covered by concrete sheets.  So there were few bottles left in the water and on the small beach, and it appeared that no more would be washed onto the beach or into the lagoon from the banks.

After a very long period of very few bottles other than new trash thrown from cars, boats or whatever, the bottles began to reappear again couple of years ago.  Not only bottles, but old tires too.  The old tires are have been washing in, especially the last few weeks.

I've been watching the tires appear and move in towards the beach.  Also I've been tracking a few other objects, but the tires are plentiful and easy to track.  Tires are increasing in areas where there  were some before but are showing up where I have scarcely ever seen them in the past fourteen years.

I'm not really much interested in how tires or bottles move in the lagoon, except for what it can teach me about the movement of objects in general in the water and on a beach.  I believe there are some important lessons to be learned there.

I always say that one of the big factors that determines how objects move in the water and on a beach, besides the density, is the shape of the object.  Bottles and tires obviously have very different shapes and both are very different from coins.  Both are very interesting, but the big hole in the middle of a tire collects sand as does the space that would be filled with air when the tire is inflated.  It becomes very heavy and all that sand inside puts a drag on it.  You'll be surprised how hard it is to move a tire filled with sand in shallow water.  They become very heavy. yet in recent days and weeks the tires in the lagoon have been moving at a rate of at least a few feet per day.  Remember, the surf in the river seldom gets over a foot, yet these flocks of tires are migrating to the beach, and they haven't done that to this extent since before 2004.

Area Where Tires Have Been Accumulating For Years.

The photo at the top of the post shows where tires are now washing up for the first time, and the photo immediately above shows an area not far away where they have been accumulating for a longer period of time.  I think you can see how difficult it would be to move a tire that is half buried and filled with wet sand, yet they are moving daily in the small surf of the lagoon.

While coins are obviously different from tires, there are periods when coins move, just like there are periods when tires and bottles move.  So what is the thing that prevented the tires from appearing for so long before they recently showed up and started moving in towards the beach.  I can't answer that precisely right now, but the obvious answer is that they were previously buried.  Just like coins they won't move as long as they are buried - not unless all the sand they are under is moved too.

In the past I've mentioned the tons of sand in front of the ocean beaches and how it will protect the coins and keep them from being washed up onto the beach.  That sand has also protected most of the ocean beaches from eroding much over the past couple of years.

When talking about the junk washing in, one person who spends a lot of time wind-surfing in the lagoon, said there is no sea weed in the lagoon right now - at least not where he goes.  His thought was that the stuff that was normally under the vegetation was now free and getting washed in.

I noticed that many of the bottles that have been showing up lately were covered with barnacles and vegetation.  So are the tires.  Unfortunately I haven't been fishing or out in the water in the lagoon enough lately to say if the sea weed is just buried or if it has died or what, but sand has been moving in for the past couple of months and building bars.  That is happening while the bottles and tires are moving in.

The lesson today is not about tires or bottles.  The point I am trying to emphasize is the various periods when different things, including sand, bottles and coins move.  They move at different times, and as I've said in previous posts, according to the force of water and other factors, including the density and shape of the objects in question.

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What do you call a flock of tires?  Anything you want I guess.  I'd say a "bunch" or a "mess."

The surf along the Treasure Coast is up to three to five feet today and expected to stay the same tomorrow.  The tides are decent.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

1/10/18 Report - The Future Starts Now. Great Article On How Sand Moves. A Few Finds.

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

Finds and photo by Steve in Sebastian

I received the following email Saturday along with the above photo from Steve.

Found these items yesterday near the power plant. Coins are modern, items on top appear to be copper or brass. Don’t know yet what large chunk in lower right is, need to investigate.


Steve.


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In my January 5 post, I included a great email from Steve about "another kind of treasure." He thought about the past and the immediate aftermath of the wrecking of the 1715 Fleet.

We know a bit about the past, so when we imagine what it must have been like for those involved, we have some history and facts to start with.  If, on the other hand, we think about the future, it seems more open-ended and more difficult.  I have a hard time imagining what it might be like three hundred years from now, but I decided to think about that a little anyhow.

If we start with current trends, it might be reasonable to expect increased development of our coastline.  With that there might be more restricted beach access.  Certainly there will be no place that you will be able to hunt in the dunes, as you could do in the not too distant past.  I'd also expect the beaches to become more unnatural.  Beach renourishment has already become a yearly thing for some beaches.  Man shapes the beaches more and more and the beaches become less natural.

The sea is rising.  The study I will refer to in more detail below talked about a rise of at least one foot per hundred years.

It seems the beaches are becoming more junky.  You see a lot of plastic and other garbage on the beach that will not deteriorate in a thousand years.  I'd expect that trend to continue.

There are a lot of questions.  Will the archaeological or homeowner communities control more and perhaps make detecting on the beaches illegal?  You might not know this but one of the homeowner groups already took legal action against salvage efforts taking place in front of their community.

Metal detectors will undoubtedly improve, but how and where will you be able to use them?

Robot metal detectors?  Years ago I thought about how I could use a remote control vehicle to carry a coil.  One big problem would be marking a hit.  I thought about using spray paint.   You get the idea.  Lots of engineering problems to solve.  Not that difficult though.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a new type of artificial sand or additive that will be used to replace or prevent the natural sand from being washed away.

Just some wild guesses.  

The future starts now.  Maybe you can help shape it in some way.

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I found a great article describing the changes that occur to a barrier island system - both short term and long term.

Here are a few excerpts.

Barrier beaches and spits are constantly raised up, shifted, and torn down by the natural ebb and flow of waves, currents, winds, and tides. Storms can reshape them abruptly and dramatically. Hooks form, inlets open and close, and beaches slowly march across their back bays and lagoons toward the mainland, as if seeking shelter from the full force of the ocean. This process allows them to naturally march upwards as sea levels rise.

On the southeastern elbow of Cape Cod, where the New England coast reaches out into the cold and choppy North Atlantic, this natural progression has been taking place in full view of satellites for more than 30 years. The images above were collected by three generations of Landsat instruments: the Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus on Landsat 7, and the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8. Each scene shows the shape of the coast off of Chatham, Massachusetts, from June 12, 1984, through September 11, 2017. (Click on the dots to scroll through the images, or hit the play arrow for a slideshow.)

The entire article is worth reading. It will help you understand the flow of sand and there fore where to find the areas where things are likely to be uncovered. This article is a must-read for any serious beach or shallow water hunter.

Here is another excerpt from the same article.

The changes to the Nauset-Monomoy barrier system are sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic. In 1984, when the image series begins, an unbroken barrier spit shields the Atlantic-facing coast of Chatham and its harbor. South of the mainland, North and South Monomoy Islands stand apart from each other and from the coast. Over the span of 30 years and 15 images, three major breaches open in the system and the barrier islands connect to the coastline and to each other at various times. All the while, sandbars and shoals—which appear as light tan waters just offshore—hint at the underwater movement of sand up and down the coast.

The first major change appears in September 1987. A nor’easter in January 1987 cut a new inlet through North Beach, forming what the locals called South Beach Island. In the 1990 image, the north end of South Beach Island nearly connects to the mainland; by 1993, the connection is complete and the south end of the spit starts to grow longer and wider. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, South Beach keeps reaching southward toward South Monomoy. Meanwhile, the waters around North Monomoy grow shallower as sandbars and shoals rise up toward the water line.

Here is the link.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/cape_cod.php



One thing they found was a major cycle that repeated about every 150 years.  There are both long-term ad short-term beach cycles.  Short term and long term cycles can interact.  I can't get into all of that now.

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On the Treasure Coast we'll have a couple days of three to five foot surf.  The tides are moderate.  The wind isn't favorable.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net