3/11/21 Report - Atypical Layering of Treasure Coast Beach Sand. Deadman's Island. Intact Octant Found on Distant Beach.

Written by the Treasure Guide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Fort Pierce South Jetty Beach Tuesday.

I think I showed this photo before, but I want to elaborate on something about it today.  I found a lot of modern coins amounting to about four or five dollars there Tuesday.  They weren't in a line or hole, but were fairly evenly spread out over the entire beach.  

Sea-Seasoned Modern Coin Finds From
Fort Pierce South Jetty Beach Tuesday.

I was going by and when I saw that the recent renurishment sand was eroding I decided to do a little detecting.  I'm always curious about what might be in renourishment sand.  I didn't know where this sand came from, but I think it was dredged up from the inlet or river.

As you can see, all the coins were modern and what I call "seasoned."  All showed obvious signs of having been lost a while, but none were very old.

When I started detecting that day, I hit an area that had a lot of shreded aluminium cans.  I thought the entire beach was going to be like that, but using discrimination picked the coins out from between the junk.  I thought the entire beach was going to be like that, but most of the beach was fairly clean.  One time when they renourished that beach it was like the county garbage dump.  It was disgusting.  This time it wasn't that bad.

Anyhow, I came to an area where there were a number of coins laying on the surface.  They weren't new coins.  The were the same type of corroded coins.  There were several in a relatively small area that I spotted visually.  In the same area there was a little aluminum, but not so much as at the really junky area.  The interesting thing was that the aluminun in this area was deeper than the coins. Moe often, it is  the other way around.  Less dense materials are usually closer to the surface than coins and denser objects, but as this case illustrates - not always.

Here is a hole I dug to retrieve a coin.

Hole Revealing
White Layer of Sand Beneath.

Notice the in the cliff face of the cut and the white sand in the hole.  The white sand iss a very fine grained powder sand that will wash away very quickly.  

Nothing very interesting was found there (as expected) but to me it was interesting because I found out what was in that renourisment sand, and thought the clear inversion of layers, which had aluminum in a layer below the coin bearing layer.  In this case I'm sure that happened because of the sequence in which the layers were dumped and spread on the beach and then some of the coins from higher layers of sand being washed out and left on the surface over the layers that were still in the uneroded layers where they were originally dumped or spread.

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Douglas alerted me to this story of Deadman's Island near Pensacola.  

Deadman’s Island was established as one of two “quarantine stations” in Pensacola Bay at the turn of the 20th century, when the yellow fever epidemic was raging.

“A quarantine station was a place on the coast where all ships coming into the harbor had to anchor. It wasn’t in town, and it was a remote and separate location where ships, once they enter, had to go and wait,” said Judy Bense, an archaeologist at the University of West Florida, the university's former president and one of the leading experts on Pensacola Bay shipwrecks.

“First, everyone on board was monitored for coming down with a disease, like malaria or smallpox or yellow fever. Just like we have to quarantine today for the COVID virus.”

Here is the link for more about that.

Secrets in the sand: The strange pandemic history beneath Deadman's Island in Gulf Breeze | News Break

And here is an excerpt from a related article. 

Six hexagonal-style coffins from the 19th-century were discovered on Dead Man's Island off Gulf Breeze in 2008. The burials are most likely associated with known historic maritime activities within Navy Cove.

I can't seem to find the original article where I found that excerpt now.

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I used to detect a lot in the Pensacola and Gulf Breeze area when I was doing consulting for the Naval Air Station up there.  I often stayed at the Gulf Breeze Holiday Inn.  They sent me a Christmas card one year.  The first time I stayed there I found a nice gold onyx ring in the shallow water behind the hotel with my Fisher Aquanaut, and did a lot of detecting on the other beaches up there.

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Yesterday I talked about octants and sextants and the parts of one that was found last weekend on the Treasure Coast by JD.  While researching that, I found an article about an old intact octant that was found on a beach.  Here is an excerpt and the source.

It’s not often that a historically valuable item washes ashore at Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. But on a lazy Sunday in mid-February this year, an octant appeared on the beach.

It was found by local resident Jenny Rump at Bluewater Bay, who at first thought it was just a piece of black plastic protruding from the sand. But then she took the instrument to retired maritime archaeologist Jenny Bennie. “I was absolutely thrilled,” says Bennie, who explains that very few ship artefacts are washed up on the beaches around the city. 

An octant is a navigational instrument, and this one probably dates to between 1780 and 1810, explains Bennie.

She is almost certain that the octant belonged to the Dutch sailing ship the Amsterdam, which was run aground almost 200 years ago, on 16 December 1817. Bennie says that she has collected other odd objects from the ship, such as a glass sky light or bits of rope, so that’s why the octant find is so special...

Here is the link for more about that find.

Valuable octant found on beach | The Heritage Portal

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The surf remains in the 4 - 5 foot range, but the easterly winds are not helping at all.

Source: MagicSeaweed.com.

When I started this blog, it seemed like detectorists (which weren't called that then) talked a lot about big waves, but very little about the direction of the waves or swell.  Changes like that take place slowly and are little noticed, but it happens.

I didn't get any guesses on the pendant I posted a couple days ago yet.  What do you think?  Seems like the octant parts drew all the attention.

I still have some finds to clean and photograph.  After doing the blog post I put off my own finds and figure I'll get to them later.  I have some cleaning, electrolysis and simple inspecting to do.

Happy hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net