1/26/19 Report - Bigger Surf Coming Monday. Search Pattern Selection For Dry and Wet Sand Areas.

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

Source: MagicSeaWeed.com.

The surf is supposed to be only about one to two feet today despite the north wind, but the surf will increase tomorrow and get up to five to seven feet on Monday.  That is a decent level of surf.  Maybe it will help some.

---

Some of what I'm going to talk about today will seem obvious to many of you.  It is something like the discovery of gravity.  It didn't take Isaac Newton to notice that apples fall, but he took it to another level.

On a beach, there will often be a flat dry beach and a wet-sand slope.  Some guys hunt the flat dry beach more, and others the wet-sand slope.

There are significant difference between those two parts of the beach, and they present different types of targets and call for different strategies.

To begin with, the flat dry beach has a lot of items that were recently lost, while the slope very often presents targets that have been lost for a while but have been either washed in from the surf or washed out of the beach. 

In general the dry beach presents more new targets while the slope presents somewhat older targets.  The dry beach, though, can turn into a part of the slope when the water had been unusually high or rough.

Two ways for old items to end up on the flat dry beach is either by being washed up from the surf or down out of the dunes.  Much less frequently old items are dropped on the dry sand.   Detectorists have done that without knowing it.  All it takes is a hole in a pocket or something like that.

Different search strategies will often be used on those two different areas.  What I call recent-drops will dominate the flat dry sand, while there will often be more seasoned targets on the slope.  The distribution of recent drops is determined by human activity, while the seasoned older items of the slope will be redistributed by the forces of nature.

One search pattern, if you can call it a pattern at all, is random.  Some people will use a random pattern on both the dry and wet sand areas.  I doubt that it is really a random pattern.  I believe there is usually something that draws a person one way and then another, even if they aren't aware of what it is. 

Some people might think that they are being guided by intuition or by some unseen force.  In that case they might not feel like it is a random search even though it would look random to an outside observer.

To repeat, targets in the dry sand area are mostly distributed by human activity, while those in the wet sand are influenced more by forces of nature.  Targets will therefore often be distributed differently in the two areas.  In the wet sand you'll often find coin lines or coin holes.  (I've described those in this blog before.)

Besides random or intuitive searches, running a grid can be effective in both types of area.  When you use a grid search, a lot of time is spent covering a relatively small area thoroughly.  My opinion is that a tight grid should only be used when you have reason to believe there is a concentration of  targets in that area or there is a high value target in that area.

In the dry sand, a grid might be used in areas such as in front of concession stands, or in front of a beach access, or any place where there are a lot of people doing things that would result in good targets.  Volleyball courts or where beach chairs are put out can be good places to grid.

In dry sand, you might also choose to go from hot spot to hot spot, going wherever it is apparent that people were active.  People leave a lot of signs.  You can see the churned sand where there was a football game, or the smoothed sand left by a beach blanket, or the trash left by beach goers.  It isn't difficult to tell where people have been and what they were doing.

In the wet sand, a grid would be very advisable when you run into a area where items have accumulated and are being uncovered or deposited.  You might have already found a few targets in the area, and think there might be more.

Instead of tracking people like you might do in the dry sand, you might want to run a looser pattern in the wet sand to see if there are any coin lines or coin holes where nature has dumped good targets.  For the wet sand I often like zig-zag pattern running roughly along the beach between the waterline and high tide mark.  

Just like in the dry sand, you will see signs that some areas in the wet sand might be better than others.  Cuts are one good sign.  You might just sample the area below a cut before committing to a tighter search pattern, zig-zagging first and then if it seems like it might be worthwhile, gridding.

One search pattern I introduced a number of years ago is a linked-spirals search pattern.  I originally developed it for working rough shallow water with little or no visibility, but it has also proved very effective for working the wet sand.  It will help you quickly  determine if there is a coin line, and if so where it is located and the direction it runs.  I won't describe the pattern in detail again.  You can find that by using this link.

https://treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com/2016/03/3316-report-linked-spiral-search.html

The linked spirals search pattern can begin as a zig-zag or straight line search and then change into a linked spirals pattern when the first target is encountered.

While I described the dry sand flat beach and wet sand slope as being different types of areas, they can overlap.  The dry sand can be hit by high water and turned into a wet sand slope.  And it is not extremely uncommon to find old objects washed up over the berm and onto the flat sand.  In my experience, they are most often on the first few feet behind the berm, and often in or in front of a something of a shell line.  Those are usually smaller targets such as half reales.

---

I have my batteries charged and and am eager to see what happens Monday.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

7/28/18 Report - Metal Detecting Wet Sand on Beach. Mystery Find. Before Clovis? .

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

Mystery Object.

This is about the size of a quarter and made of a light metal such as aluminum.  I don't know what it is and would appreciate any ideas or information you might be able to provide.  I think it might be a token, but can't find any remaining design on it.  Could be just a washer or something, but I'm leaning more towards token.

That is a triangular hole in the middle.

---

In the 1920s, archaeologists dug up a trove of ancient artifacts near Clovis, New Mexico. What humans had known about their past was changed forever. These artifacts were the oldest man-made objects found on the Western Hemisphere, and the discovery led to a theory that the first humans to set foot in the Americas did so around about 13,000 years ago, and that they made and used tools like the ones found near Clovis.

Now a group of archaeologists from Texas State University are offering some of the most convincing evidence yet to challenge this “Clovis First” theory. They’ve recently discovered about 150,000 artifacts near at the Gault Archaeological Site near Killeen, Texas. What they’ve found could change what we know about the timeline of human history...

Here is the link for more about that.

http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/archaeologists-say-humans-may-have-come-to-texas-earlier-than-previously-thought/

I never trusted archaeological dating techniques too much anyhow.

Just a reminder - arrow heads and other stone or shell artifacts occasionally show up on Treasure Coast beaches.  I've shown a few in the past.

---

I once talked to a guy at the beach who was using a very high end gold detector.  He told me that the detector detected deeper when he walked along the beach north/south than when he walked in and out from the water.  He said he thought it had something to do with the magnetic fields.  He was observing something real, but it had nothing to do with the earth's magnetic fields.

On another occasion a guy using an Excalibur saw me using an Excalibur detector in the wet sand and shallow moving wate and asked to see what settings I was using.  A lot of people don't know how to detect in the wet sand.  This fellow was undoubtedly using discrimination mode and getting false signals when he was in the wet sand area.

I was using what I almost always used when detecting the beach with my Excalibur.  I used maximum sensitivity and pinpoint rather than discrimination mode.

What the first man was missing was the fact that as the salt water covers and recedes from the beach, it creates bands of mineralization.  Most of the dry beach in Florida has almost no mineralization, except where you have black sand.  But the ocean is salt water and the water and wet sand is mineralized.

When you are in the wet sand area, you have bands of mineralization.  The detector has to adjust to the different levels of mineralization.  If you are walking along the waterline, when you swing the coil, your coil crosses those bands of mineralization.  As your detector attempts to adjust, you will lose some sensitivity.  It can also cause false signals.

If you walk in and out from the water, your sweeps are not crossing the bands of changing mineralization so much.  You are sweeping with the bands instead of across them.  Therefore your detector does not have to adjust to so many changes.  That reduces false signals caused by changes in mineralization and gives what appears to be an increase in sensitivity and depth of detecting.

There are a variety of methods for dealing with the changing mineralization in the wet sand zone.  One is to decrease your detectors sensitivity.  Another is to increase discrimination.  And another is to ground balance your detector to the salt water, if your detector has that capability.

Decreasing sensitivity or increasing discrimination can both have negative effects.  You don't want to do either of those any more than necessary.  You have to weigh the positive and negatives of each method.  Your choice will be in part determined by the type of detector you use.

Another approach is to use all metals or pinpoint mode.  That is what I did more than anything else.  

In pinpoint or all-metals mode you can hear the changes in mineralization, especially at the line where the most recent water stopped, however you can learn to tell the difference between the sound caused by mineralization and a real target - most of the time.  If a target is deep or real small, it is more difficult, so you might lose some borderline targets that way, but not much, and you'll do better than with most other approaches.

With a detector like the ATX you can ground balance out the salt water mineralization and do very well.  Still, if you want every last bit of depth, use non-motion mode.  You'll hear some of the salt mineralization, but you'll still get that last bit of sensitivity to deep and small targets.  Non-motion mode in wet sand takes a bit of practice, but it works well once you master it.

I sometimes test and compare the different modes or approaches.  Go over an area with one mode and take out all targets and then use the other mode.  I've done that enough that I know how the different modes compare.  Of course you have to master each mode in order to make good comparisons.

---

There is no significant weather in the Atlantic right now.  We still have a two to three foot surf and moderate tides.

8/27/16 Report - Cluster Hunting During Generally Poor Beach Conditions. Three Tropical Disturbances Now.

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

Three Disturbances.
Source: Nola.com/hurricane

We now have three disturbances and hurricane Gaston, which is in the mid Atlantic.

It looks like North Carolina might get some good hunting.

Invest 99 L is moving into the Gulf where it is expected to strengthen.

The Treasure Coast will be getting days of south winds and some rain, and about a 2 - 3 foot surf.

---

I went for a little hunt yesterday morning.  I did manage to find one little cut.  It wasn't any higher than one foot at the peak, but ran for maybe 80 yards.

It was not an entirely new cut though.  There has been a touch of erosion at that same spot on and off for some weeks now.  I knew to look for it because I've seen it a few times over the past weeks.  Once an area has lost some sand, it is more susceptible to additional losses.

Sometimes I do one type of post for a while, and then do another type.  When I began this blog, the purpose was to give a daily beach conditions report relative to finding old shipwreck items.  Since conditions for finding old things has been so consistently poor and there were seldom any significant changes to mention, I quit giving a daily rating, but I will give my beach conditions rating when we get some significant changes.

Sometimes I talk about using a detector, and other times maybe reading a beach, or finds.  Lately I've been posting a lot of finds and haven't talked too much about techniques or strategies.  Today I'll talk a little about cluster hunting.

As you probably know if you've been reading this blog very long, I very often recommend digging everything.  A lot of people don't agree with that, but one reason I do not use discrimination very much is that I spend a lot of my time where there are more good targets and very little trash.  There are times when I will dig in a trashy area, but very seldom when I'm in the wet sand or shallow water. I can't give a lot of detail about all of that again today. That would take a long time, and besides, I've talked about a lot of that in the past.

Anyhow, yesterday I did some "cluster hunting." I dug a pocketful of coins and some jewelry in a small amount of time.  I dug no bottle tops or pull tabs.  They weren't present where I was spending my time even though the particular beach has a lot of pull tabs and other junk.  I could have spent my time on other areas of the beach and found tons of bottle tops and other junk.

Here is an illustration of the area that I focused on today.  The illustration is a little rough, but it will help me to explain.

I was hunting the front slope of the beach at low tide.  In the illustration, that is the area between the top black line and the bottom blue line.

There was a cut (outlined in brown) that was about 80 yards long.  The cut was small, only about a foot tall at the peak and got even smaller to the south and north.

The productive area (coins and things) were between the orange lines.  To the north (right) the cluster started south of the end of the cut.  The productive area did not extend to the wet sand during low tide.

The targets were relatively dense in front of the cut.  The productive area ran almost parallel to the water line as it extended beyond the cut and to the south.  Targets were farther apart as I went beyond the cut to the south.  Some targets to the south were also deeper.

The jewelry was found close together in one area (blue).  It was mostly junk, because the people at that visit this beach wear cheap stuff.  That is just the way it is.  If the beach goers at this beach was a little more glitzy the finds would have been better.  That is something you have to take into account.

The first key to cluster hunting, is to locate the cluster.   It took me a few minutes to find it.  The first area I checked was the wet sand, which produced nothing.  There are times that I would walk directly to the cut, but this beach has a history of a lot of wet sand finds, so I did a quick check of that area.

After digging a few targets that are close together, but apparently not a part of a spill, the next in cluster hunting is to get a rough estimate of the size and location of the boundaries of the cluster, as well as identify the center of the cluster.  The center of the cluster is where dense objects will be located and where the finds will be close together.  I won't get into tons of ifs ands and buts or other details today.

I wasn't much interested in modern stuff today.  The modern stuff at this beach is cheap stuff.  It is rare to find anything good there.  I worked it out simply because it was there, and I was there.

Once you identify a cluster and its boundaries you can pick up a lot of finds quickly.  You won't need discrimination because the area you are working has been sifted and sorted and there won't be much junk in the cluster.  If you start moving outside the cluster, you might start hitting more junk.

Again, this applies to wet areas.  Areas that have been high and dry will not have been sifted and sorted like this.

--

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

12/3/15 Report - Treasure Traps and Trapping Treasure. Sifting In Wet Sand. Bigger Surf Coming.

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

We all know that treasure moves.  From the time it is spilled into the ocean or onto the beach it moves.  It doesn't move continually though.  There will be times of relative stability, and there will be times when it can move quickly.

If you've ever dug a coin while standing in a rushing backwash of any magnitude and drop a coin before getting it firmly in your pocket, you know how quickly a coin can move yards in the matter of a second or two.

And if you ever dropped a coin in the ocean and watched it fall, you probable say it going one way or the other instead of falling straight down

The longer an item is out there on the beach or in the water, the more likely it is that it has reached a point of relative stability where it will not move much again until something fairly dramatic happens such a good storm or hurricane, for example.   The longer it has been out there, the more it will take to get it to move again.

I remember reading over twenty years ago how a one fellow constructed a trap on the beach to trap gold rings.  I think I read about that in Carter and Trevillian's book, Diamonds in the Surf.  If I correctly recall, the fellow constructed the trap out of stones.

After reading that story I made sure to check under and around rocks for gold rings and found a few that way.

If you think about it, treasure is trapped in all kinds of traps.

There was one time when I dug five silver dimes in one scoop.  They had settled at the bottom of a fallen palm tree after they washed out of a dune and down a slope.

I often focus my detecting around one type of trap or another.  Groins, seawalls dips and rocks and even clay or mud can create treasure traps.

You will observe natural treasure traps at work when you are detecting.  I detected one treasure trap day after day for months.  It was an area in front of a sea wall and behind a conrete goin.  It seemed like every night there would be a new supply of coins and jewelry there.

It is possible to construct your own treasure traps.  The first thing to know is how treasure moves. Just like anyone who traps wild animals, it helps to know how and where the game moves.

Although I have managed to construct some small traps and obtained some results, constructing highly effective treasure traps on an ocean beach does not seem practical.  I'll still keep thinking about it.

---

One thing I've noticed lately is that most people do not use their scoops to sift wet sand when detecting in the wet sand.  Many people dump the wet sand on the ground and spread it out with a foot.  They either then see the target or pinpoint it with their detector.

It is difficult to sift wet sand.  That made me think about constructing a different type of digger for compact wet sand.

You can always use the moving water to sift the wet sand through your scoop, but the risk is that if the item is very small and falls through the screen or otherwise falls out of the scoop, you can easily lose it in the moving water.  That can cause time and perhaps the item.  That technique can still be used if you are careful.  You might be able tell if the item is large enough to sift in moving water without going through the screen of your scoop.  You will still need to be careful that the item doesn't fall out of your scoop.

---

The surf on the Treasure Coast was small today.  Saturday it will increase.  The peak surf will be late Saturday night.

We'll have a north or northeast wind for a few days.  It was out of the north today.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

4/11/15 Report - Lot Of Sand On Treasure Coast Beaches. Cutting False Signals With Sweep Control.

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



Treasure Coast Beach This Morning.

 This is what it looked like this morning on the Treasure Coast.   There was a rain shower off shore.  The noseeums were biting.

The front beach is still accumulating sand on top of layers of shells.  It feels firm in places, but it is new layers of sand over shells, not sand compacted over time.



Surf On Treasure Coast This Morning.

A few waves seemed to come off of the rain shower at times.  It generally wasn't as rough as it looks here.



One of Three Other Detectorists I Saw This Morning.

This fellow was using a large coil in the wet sand.

One fellow wasn't filling his holes and was where the water wouldn't fill them very soon.

The three detectorists that I saw were all in the wet sand.  The dry sand didn't have many targets of any kind - good or bad.

It was pretty hot already this morning.

I visited another beach, which I seem to have pretty much to myself, and dug a good number of coins and things.  That beach has very little junk on it because I've cleaned it up for myself.  Junk targets are scarce, making it possible to run zero discrimination and full power without being bothered by trash.

I've been talking about marginal signals.  After I write about something I always notice it more.  Today I noticed that maybe ten percent of my good targets came from marginal signals that could have easily been overlooked.

You can get what I call marginal signals when the target is under the edge of the coil or out from the coil if you have a coil with good peripheral sensitivity.  You can also get them from deep targets near the limits of what your detector will detect. When you get one of those blips, double check them.  There is indeed a skill to recognizing them as possible good signals that need to be checked.

Here are some things you can do to cut down on false signals besides properly ground balancing and decreasing sensitivity.

Don't sweep the coil too fast.

Don't tilt the coil at any time during the sweep.   Most people tend to tilt at least a little at the end of each sweep.  Keep the coil flat.

Slow down coil movement at the end of each sweep.  Round the sweep pattern at the end of each sweep as you change direction.

A sharp sweep pattern with a  sharp quick change of direction will cause false signals at the ends of the sweep (where the arrows are), especially in salt or other mineralized soil.   The illustration above shows a more rounded sweep pattern, as is recommended.

This pattern requires slowing the coil speed at the ends of each sweep.  It really doesn't require much.   If I simply think of sweeping as if the sweep pattern was a very flat figure eight instead of left to right and right to left, that is about all it takes.  The difference is so small you probably wouldn't notice the difference in the path of the coil visually, but it will diminish false signals.


Don't expect any significant change in Treasure Coast beach conditions this week.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

8/26/14 Report - Rare and Valuable 1725 OMD 8 Reale. Few Small Cuts On Treasure Coast. 3 - 5 Foot Surf Continues. Ace 250 Tested On Beach. New Disturbance in Gulf.

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

To be auctioned during the upcoming SedwickCoins Nov. 6, 2014 auction.

For more information here is the link.  http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=9a501b2f-1cb3-4254-b702-c38b9ca8b983&c=116708e0-3539-11e3-b96a-d4ae52844279&ch=12520520-3539-11e3-ba6f-d4ae52844279

One Foot Cut On A Treasure Coast Beach.

Above is one of the few scattered cuts that I found on the Treasure Coast.  It is about one foot.

It is actually the front ledge.  Behind is cut is the remains of a cut that was created quite a while ago.

The sand in front of the cut is mushy.  Not very promising at all.  To top it off, the sand that was eroded is newly accumulated sand.   No reason for a beach conditions rating upgrade.

The above video was taken at another beach after yesterday's high tide.  Again no significant improvement in beach conditions.

Christobal has produced a little bigger surf on the Treasure Coast, but so far it hasn't done a lot to improve beach conditions.



Yesterday I gave the Ace 250 its first beach test.  Previously I tested the 250 inland and posted the results.

Once again my expectations were exceeded.  Perhaps it was because my expectations were not very high.  I did not expect it to do well in wet salt sand.

Before I get into that though, it worked fine in the dry sand.  I'm not talking about earth shaking depth, but decent depth and good target ID and discrimination with no other problems.  The light 250 was a joy to swing after swinging a heavy underwater detector with a weighted coil.

After testing in the dry sand, I tested the 250 on the beach front where the water was washing up over the berm.  In fact it was right behind the cut you see at the top of the post, but near high tide when the water was washing up over the berm.   The 250 detected coins easily at decent depth in mushy wet sand.  When the moving water hit the coil or when a hole was dug in the newly wet sand, false signals did occur.  Detecting in the wet sand when the water was not rushing caused no problems.  Basically the same thing happens with more expensive detectors such as the Excalibur are used at the water line with moving salt water.  The difference is that with the Excalibur I would switch modes to deal with that, but there was no good solution with the 250.  What do you expect?  The price is only about 20% as much.

This test was not a highly controlled or very precise test.  It was just my simple first test of the 250 at the beach and in wet sand.   It did better than I expected in the wet sand.   It is fine in the dry sand, and workable in wet sand as long as conditions aren't too rough.

Source: www.nhc.noaa.gov

Besides Christobal, which is heading north, we now have two other areas to watch.  Note the new one in the Gulf.

The surf on the Treasure Coast is predicted to be 3 - 5 feet Tuesday and Wednesday.  The wind is blowing this morning and the surf is up. 

Thursday the surf will begin to decrease again.

While Christobal heads north, there is another disturbance that is approaching the West Indies. 

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@Comcast.net

8/1/14 Report - New Tropical Storm in Atlantic. Diving Near The Wedge Wreck. Detecting a Treasure Coast Beach Today.

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

Diving North of Fort Pierce Inlet This Morning.

We have a new tropical storm heading this way.   Bertha is the second named storm of the season.  At present it doesn't look like it will be much more than a tropical storm and is supposed to pass well east of us.  They do a good job of predicting anymore, but there is always the possibility of some error.  I'll be keeping an eye on Bertha anyhow.

On the Treasure Coast we'll have a one-foot surf today, and then we'll have a one to two-foot surf for about a week.  So if the current predictions are accurate, Bertha won't affect us much.



Beach This Morning Near Low Tide.



This is the kind of thing we've been having nearly all summer this year.

On this beach a very fine compact layer of powder-like sand goes all the way to the dry sand.  Wasn't easy to dig deeper holes.  Really compact stuff.

I detected the area below the high-tide line.  This beach usually has a lot of pull tabs.   From the high tide line to the water this morning, there were NO pull tabs.  Only a good number of coins and couple rings and a fork.   That was very unusual.  I had to wonder what happened to all the pull tabs and bottle tops that are usually all over this beach.  There were still bottle tops in the dry sand, but the pull tabs were not there.

I took a Whites \Surf PI Dual Field detector this morning.  It turned out to be a good choice this morning -  no junk in the wet sand, but a good number of coins.  Except for one spill, most of the coins were down about six inches or so.

I have worked this beach in the past with an Excalibur.  I would have given the Ace a test in the wet sand, but I don't like to take two detectors to the beach in the summer.  It is too hot to leave a detector in the car.  That isn't really a good idea anyhow.  Don't leave anything of value in the car.

It is a good idea to check your detector before you leave home.  It can be a pain to get to the beach and find out that something is wrong.  It is also a good idea to have some spare batteries.

I really like to be able to switch detectors depending upon conditions. 

In the wet sand there were ripples and some black sand scattered about.  Again, I think the choice of detectors was a particularly good one today considering the conditions.

I got word of a platinum and diamond ring being lost a couple of days ago.  Things are always being lost.  I'll look for it.

The two rings I found were about six inches apart.

It seems that most beaches have one spot that is better than the others.  This one definitely does.


If you missed yesterday's post, you'll want to be sure to see that.


You have until August 20 to consign to the Nov. 5-6 Sedwick Coins auction.

Here is the link for more information.

http://www.sedwickcoins.com/consign.htm


And here is the projected path for Bertha according to NOAA.

 

Happy hunting,

TreasureGuide@Comcast.net

1/3/2011 - Wet Sand Hunting

A Couple Additional Unidentified Items Recently Found in a Coin Hole Not Far From a Suspected 17th Century Wreck.

The strip of lead is about two inches long and seems to have a pattern stamped into it. The pattern appears to consist of slightly curved lines running at about 45 degrees from the long edges of the strip in a cross-hatched pattern.

Other than that, I don't have any ideas about it. It could possibly be from any of a wide variety of time periods.

I get the feeling that the shell pendant, or whatever, is modern. I haven't determined the type of metal yet.



Before the end of the year, I started answering a question someone asked about the best way to hunt a beach. I did a couple of posts talking about hunting what I call "recent drops" in the dry sand. I didn't finish the topic though because I had some other things to talk about.

Today I'll talk a little about hunting the wet sand. For today's purposes, the term "wet sand" will include the area from the highest extent of the recent high tides down to the water's edge.

Hunting wet sand is very different from hunting the dry sand. In the dry sand, items will remain pretty much where they are dropped. In the wet sand, they will change location because of the movement of water.

When hunting wet sand watch for any movement of sand. New sand accumulating on a beach is generally not a good sign, but cuts are a good sign. Big cuts are one of the easiest things to spot and can be one of the best places to hunt. Generally speaking, the bigger the cut, the better the hunting, but there are exceptions.

Often the area just below a big cut will produce a lot of coins and other items.
Sometimes that same area will produce nothing, but it is always worth checking. Sometimes someone will clean it out before you get there and sometimes the coins will get moved down into the water or down the beach in one direction or another.

Cuts will fill in. The next day it can fill in, and then the next day after that, it can erode again, replenishing the targets.

Related topics that I've talked about in the past are "vertical compacting," "coin lines" and "coin holes."

There are times, though few, when you can find a beach front with newly pile up sand containing a bunch of coins or other targets.

In the wet sand the coins will be sifted and distributed by weight, or perhaps more correctly, by density as they are acted upon by the water. It is something like the effect of moving water on gold nuggets in a pan. The denser materials are separated from the lighter materials.

The longer the water acts upon the targets over hours or even days, and the greater the force of the water, the more the items of different kinds will be separated.

It is actually not only by density that the items are separated. Other factors such as shape of the object and how much the materials adhere to sand and other factors will also affect the distribution.

In the past, I've also talked about how the shape of coins affects how they are distributed. Having a low profile, they aren't moved by the water as easily as object that are shaped in a way that offers more surface area for the force of the water to act upon. They hug the surface and tend to remain behind as the sand gets washed away.

Anyhow, what you want to hunt in the wet sand is the areas where the heavier objects are most likely to be deposited. Again, there will be a pattern if the water has acted upon the area very forcibly for very long. Heavy objects such as gold or lead will be distributed near the center and lighter objects elsewhere.

There will often be a progression and by identifying that progression, you can sometimes track your way from the lighter materials to the denser materials. That, by the way, is another reason to not use too much discrimination. If you discriminate out materials, you will not see the progression and you will lose information that could guide you.

In the past I have referred to tracking treasure. It is something like an old Indian that tracks down a deer. He benefits by knowing where the herds travel during the different seasons, he knows how to identify the clues, and he knows their tracks.

I think that is enough on that topic for today.


Do you know what 20th Century copper penny sold for $1.7 million dollars in 2010?

Here is the link that will give you the answer.

http://www.luxist.com/2010/09/23/rare-penny-sells-for-1-7-million/


Forecast and Conditions.

It doesn't look like there will be any significant changes this week. The wind is out of the northwest and the seas are relatively calm

I'd rate the treasure beach detecting conditions as a 1 (poor) and likely to stay that way for a few days.


Happy hunting.
TreasureGuide@comcast.net