Treasure Beaches Report: Pt. 2. (2020 and Beyond). : 1/25/22 Report -Nice Seated Liberty Coins Found. Coin Lines and Using Information From Dug Coins.

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

1877 Liberty Seated Half Dollar
Find and photo by Al C.

Here is the message Al C. sent me with the photo above.

I found a seated dime, 1875, 10 or 15 years ago when they cleared a lot on Indian River Drive near Midway and never thought I would find another seated coin on the Treasure Coast. I was completely shocked when I rubbed the sand off this half dollar. But I am still stunned that after I filled in the hole and for the heck of it went over it again and heard a scratchy broken signal that turned out to be another one! Unreal! 1877 and 1867 half dollars from right here on the Treasure Coast.

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I told you about how Saturday I was digging a coin line and coins, and all of them were deep. In fact a lot of them gave faint and inconsistent signals, and I dug mostly quarters, which, of course, are larger, and would be more easily detected at depth. Almost all of the recoveries required a good number of scoops because of how deep they were. The coin line was deep, and most of the coins were found in two dips where there was less sand over the coin line. I did dig some smaller coins, and they all gave very faint signals and were also deep.

One of the things I don't like so much about the Equinox is how much a hole can cause the loss of a signal. A coin that is easily detected in undisturbed ground can easily be lost once the first scoop is taken, which disturbs the wet sand. There are ways to deal with that, but it seems the Equinox is more sensitive to that than some of the other detectors I've used. Not sure. Just my impression.

Anyhow, coin lines have length, width, thickness and depth. Some are shallow, and can be right on the surface, but some can be deep, as this one was.

Below is an illustration. The top illustration shows a shallow coin line that permits most targets to be recovered. The line is shallow and not too thick.

Below that is illustrated a deeper coin line. There are in that illustration, however, dips, which permit access to some of the targets in the coin line. That is what I was working Saturday.

Some coin lines are deep, either because they were buried by natural sand movement or because someone has removed the shallower targets without getting the deeper ones.

The second illustration shows a deeper coin line, but there are a couple dips in the sand making some parts of the coin line more detectable than others. The coin line I worked on Saturday and Sunday was more exposed where there were a couple dips. It made it appear as if there were two coin holes, but I am pretty sure it was just that the coins of the coin line were detectable at the dips and not detectable where there was deeper sand.

The targets that I could access were still deep though. I am sure there were many that I could not detect, and which would become detectable if I got more erosion in the area. That did not happen Sunday. Very little, if any, additional erosion occurred between Saturday and Sunday, so when I returned, I was only able to detect a few deep targets in the areas that I passed up the day before because of lack of time. Those were more faint signals and included more dimes than I dug the day before. I can't be totally sure that there were more undetectable targets, but I am pretty sure there were. If I took the time to scrape down some a few inches of sand I probably would have found that there were more targets there.

It is not typical to get a lot more quarters than other coins, as I did Saturday. I was just digging the stronger signals and larger coins of the deep coin line. Keep track of what you normally get and pay attention to the types of coins you are and are not finding. It is typical to get a lot of pennies relative to other coins, but that was not the case Saturday. That provided a clue as to what was going on.

There can be valuable information in what you are and are not finding as well as the lay of the land. Read your finds as well as the beach. For example, a lot more quarters than pennies is unusual and significant. A lot of nickels relative to other types of coins can often indicate that someone else has been there and, they used discrimination or a detector that was not as sensitive to nickels. That is another example.

The coins I recovered Saturday and Sunday were not old coins, although they had been out there long enough to become green and encrusted. The small amoutn of erosion at that location didn't put me into the older stuff.

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The old TreasureBeachesReport.blogspot.com provides several posts on coins lines that you might find helpful.

Here are a few of those links.

https://treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com/2015/09/92915-report-how-tbr-beach-studies-paid.html

The Treasure Beaches Report Direct From Florida's Treasure Coast.: 11/12 Report - 800 Foot Long Gold Chain & Detecting Coin Lines

The Treasure Beaches Report Direct From Florida's Treasure Coast.: 12/7/14 Report - Comparing and Contrasting Beach Object Distributions On Two Different Metal Detecting Outings.

You can also go to the blog and use the search terms box.

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