Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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John Brooks Beach 4/28 Shortly After Low Tide.
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Here are the first beach photos that I took for four or five weeks. In the distance you can see one detectorist, who evidently arrived not long after the beach opened.
Not much to see beside sand, although there was also a person to the south collecting shells. No problem with social distancing here. There was about a hundred yards between people.
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John Brooks Beach 4/29.
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The surf was just a little choppy. You can see the shell collector in this photo.
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Frederick Douglass Beach 4/28
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You can see how sandy it was from the deep footprints.
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Another Look at Frederick Douglass Beach.
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A few people had already been there.
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Blind Creek Beach 4/28.
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A little farther to the south, Blind Creek looked pretty much the same.
I'm afraid we are now into summer beach conditions and will be waiting for the occasional storm to move some of the summer sand.
There are also places where beach renourishment is in full swing, such as at Fort Pierce South Jetty Park. It seems to me that they do that beach at least every year, but some official claimed it wasn't that often.
I had other things I had to do so, those are the only beaches I saw. I don't know how the Indian River County beaches looked.
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Dj got out to do some detecting. Here is what he said.
Can’t decide what this is made of. It has a consistent thickness of 1/16” of an inch. But it was good to get out on the first day of beach opening. As expected not much erosion; just some old cuts with large shells and less sand on the front than a month ago.
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DJ's Find of the Day.
Photo by DJ
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I'm sure everybody is happy to be able to get out on the beaches again even though we don't have the best beach detecting conditions.
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As you probably know, I don't use discrimination much. One reason is that some of the better targets are very difficult to identify from a metal detector response. That is especially true of items made of various materials and items that can be positioned in a variety of ways. Watches are an example.
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Sample Watches.
Guess, Armitron, Orient, Seiko, and Seiko.
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I've probably found a hundred watches, including some very expensive ones, but for this experiment I just pulled out a few.
Watches will give different metal detector readings depending upon several different factors. One, of course, is what they are made of. That sounds simple enough, but remember they are made of a variety of materials - the workings, watch case, and band can all be different metals.
Another factor is how the watch is laying. They can be either face up, as shown in the photo, or often on edge. And since they are odd shaped, it depends upon which direction your coil goes over the watch. When face up, you can get one reading when sweeping more over the face, and another when you sweep more over the band. When these watches were face up, most of them gave a conductivity number on the Equinox of either 16-17 or 30-33. Some of the watches gave more of the lower range number, while other gave more in the upper range. The better watches tend to give more readings in the 30-33 range.
If you stand them on edge, you'll often get a much weaker signal. In fact the first watch shown above, the Guess, if standing on edge and the coil moving in one direction (parallel to the edge of the face) indicated iron. If you were discriminating iron, you would have heard almost nothing at all.
The main point is that with a complex target like a watch, the signal will vary depending upon several different factors. If you know what causes the variations you can still get a good idea that you might be detecting a watch before you dig it up. Don't forget to vary the position and angle of your sweep to observe the differences.
Generally speaking, better watches will tend to have more of the higher conductivity numbers.
My most recent Rolex was found in dry sand, as were some of the other good watches, but another good place to check for watches is in shallow shell-filled dips in the water. They will generally ride pretty high in the sand.
One way you can get to know your metal detector better is by practicing with a variety of known targets.
If it doesn't sound like a coin or ring that doesn't necessarily mean it is no good.
Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net