Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| John Brooks Beach Friday Morning. |
I went out to look at one beach. I had in mind doing some fossil hunting after all the rain. I took my detector, but didn't use it.
As you can see John Brooks beach hasn't changed much since the last time I was there.
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| John Brooks Beach Friday Morning. |
The surf seemed higher than predicted, but that might have been because of the high tide and the swells breaking on the sand in front of the beach.
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| Ad From A 1997 Issue of Gold and Treasure Hunter Magazine. |
I always like to think of different ways of doing things. Not long ago I mentioned the Merkitch sifter. It worked, but wasn't easy.
Here is another contraption. It is called a Gold Well. It is basically a dredge with a "super vacuum." The idea is that you could get to lower levels of gold bearing soil without moving all the overburden. I don't know if it really worked or not. Unlike the Merkitch sifter I never tried the Gold Well. I liked the idea and thought about the same kind of approach before ever seeing it but never went so far as to purchase or make one.
Interesting. I would have liked to try it.
Sampling is something I have talked about and recommend a lot. Sampling is basically data collection. In other words it is the core of any empirical scientific approach.
I wanted to make a few more comments on the diagram I showed yesterday. Here it is.
One thing I don't think I mentioned yesterday is how it applied to beach hunting. The same principles apply to how targets of different types and densities are distributed whether it is in a stream or on the front of a beach that gets periodically washed. The main difference is the more or less continous stream of water working over many years on the gold in a stream. Targets on a beach are only moved periodically and not over such a long period of time. Still the basic principles are the same and gold and other items are distributed in much the same way.
Maybe you noticed the patagraph that I quoted from the Al Cline article yesterday. "After we've cleaned the top portion of each section, then we go down to bedrock, again looking for different layers of material, heavy metals such as lead, steel, etc., working each section and testing before the working the next layer."
I've previously commented on using dense metals ie. lead as an important indicator when metal detecting.
Another important thing about Cline's testing method, which maybe you can't see in the illustration, is how he recorded what was found at each location.
Besides finding out if each hole or area produced gold, by analyzing all the samples, you get a picture of how the gold is likely to be distributed as an overall pattern.
I'll give you one more important sentence, but I won't take the time to elavorate and spell it all out for you.
Cline says, "As Dave McCracken states in his dredging videos, when you hit pay dirt or the paystreak, the hardest thing to do is to fall back and find the tail end of the flow."
There is really a lot in that sentence, but I won't get into that more now.
This same approach of sampling applies to coin lines as well as to gold stream.
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| Source: nhc.noaa.gov |
Althought the surf is not big, as you can see in the photos and video above it is a little rough.
There are a few dips and even a little erosion on some beaches, but nothing that would cause me to upgrade beach detecting conditions.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net