Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
Here is a hypothetical beach profile. It shows a beach with high dunes that have a relatively high eroded face. It is something like the beaches you will find in the Seagrape and Turtle Trail areas. John Brooks and Frederick Douglass beaches are different. They do not have high dunes on the back beach.
The illustration shows the beach level in brown, but also the beach profile as it existed some time in the past due to extensive erosion. That previously eroded beach level is shown in grey.
The dune face will sometimes erode back too.
The yellow shows the level where the oldest items will be found. If you are hunting old items, you might call that "pay dirt."
In the back dunes the old items will often be around a 18 inches deep, give or take a foot or so depending upon how much the sand has been building up at the location.
On the beach in front of that the sand will have been eroded to some deep level some time in the past and you will find areas where old dense items have accumulated at those older deeply eroded areas. After the erosion, as you've seen many many times over the past months, the erosion fills in again and buries those items.
You also have deep items under the front beach and under the sand in the shallow water.
Of course the level of the top layer of sand changes frequently, not only from erosion caused by the surf, but also by blowing sand. Most of the time when modest erosion occurs, it doesn't get down near the oldest accumulations of items. The sand can come and go in a given area hundreds of times without getting down to the layers bearing old items.
Modest levels of erosion that don't get down to the oldest layers can however expose items having a little age, but they will most often not be as old as those found in the deeper layers.
A couple weeks ago we had some modest erosion that exposed accumulations that had some age to them, but most were not much older than a year or so. They were found along with coins that were so recently dropped that they were still bright and shiny.
The amount of erosion is important if you are looking for very old items. Most of the time when you see modest erosion, it is just the same old sand being cycled in and out. When that occurs some newer items might be exposed, but not the oldest items. And when that occurs, you generally won't see old items being washed up either. That takes a good amount of water force. See my posts on "trigger points" and "drop points." Here is a link to one of those. The Treasure Beaches Report Direct From Florida's Treasure Coast.: 6/28/15 Report - Trigger Points, Drop Points, Water Velocity and How Things Move And Get Sorted On A Beach.
I think people sometimes get excited when they see some slight amount of erosion not realizing that nothing eroded except recently accumulated sand that doesn't have anything old in it. It is just some of frequent and inconsequential cycling of top sand.
Then there is the sand brought in from beach renourishment, which can change things a lot. If it is non-productive sand, tons of it can erode without producing anything old. It will also more deeply cover old items buried in the shallow water and keep those items from being uncovered. Obviously old items buried in the shallow water must be uncovered before they are washed up onto the beach.
The old items in the back dunes will fall down the slope onto the flat beach on occasion. That mostly requires the surf to hit the dune face, but when it happens, very old items can end up being found near the surface of the mid-beach area. Those items, if not picked up fairly quickly, can then be cycled around with much newer items.
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Maybe you've found something like the item below before and wondered what it is.
It is an airgun cartridge.
I recently learned of the surprising history of air guns. The airgun represents the oldest pressurized gas technology known to man. The bellows airgun is the oldest mechanical airgun known to exist and dates back to around 1580 and currently resides in the Livrustkammaren Museum in Stockholm, Sweden...During the 1600s people started hunting large game animals such as deer and wild boar with big-bore air rifles ranging from .30 caliber up to and including a .51 caliber rifle. These large caliber airguns were charged using a hand pump to fill an air chamber and produced velocities ranging from 650 to 1,000 FPS (200–300 m/s). These high powered air rifles were also adopted into military use around this time; the most well known example being the Girandoni Military Repeating Air Rifle...
Here is a link for more about that.
AirGun History (airgunexpert.com)
In the late 1700's, powerful pneumatic guns even found their way into the ranks of the military. The Austrian Army had an entire regiment armed with .44 caliber repeating air rifles. All surviving accounts indicate that the Austrians used those airguns with deadly effectiveness against Napoleon's army. So feared, any Austrian soldier captured with an air rifle was summarily executed as an assassin!
On out own continent, the records of the Lewis and Clark expedition show that an airgun was taken along and the Indians called it "the smokeless thunder stick". Early airguns production in the United States centered around the "gallery gun", a relatively low powered gun utilizing a spring piston power plant. These guns flourished during the period immediately following our Civil War and were used mainly for shooting at paper targets indoors. As the 19th century came to a close, the calibers of airguns of both America and Europe had been scaled down considerably...
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The more things change the more they remain the same. According to the internet, that quote appears in George Bernard Shaw's 'Revolutionist's Handbook' (1903) and earlier was used by the French novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-90).
You will remember John Sullivan, a left wing activist from the Insurgence USA group, as one of the first arrested for participating in the Capital Hill riot, but unlike most, including a Fort Pierce man, was immediately released without charges. Video taken by the 25-year-old showed him following and encouraging Trump supporters from the entrance of the Capitol all the way to the moment when 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who attempted to climb through a window into the Speaker's Lobby, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer. Right out of the communist playbook (See Communism and the New Left, 1970.). Sullivan received large sums of money from mainstream news companies for his videos of the events. Reminds me of how the FBI tipped off a news company for the arrest of Roger Stone so the pre-dawn raid would be nationally televised. Interesting how quickly Sullivan was released.
Here is a source.
You'll get a great understanding of what is going on today if you read some of the better analysis of the 70s. If you are old enough and paid attention, you've seen a lot of this before. Despite the feeling by the younger generation that they are pushing on with new ideas into new frontiers, there is not much new. Is it just coincidence that our top government leaders are old boomers, who were baptized in the same ideas and strategies in the seventies? My answer is a clear no.
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The MagicSeaWeed surf prediction for Sunday has softened a little, but just one foot.
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| MagicSeaWeed Surf Predictions. |
Hopefully it won't decrease any more.
People are interested in first hand updates on beach closings and openings. Let me know what you see.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
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