Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Mexico Half Reale From John Brooks Beach. |
On and off, I've been doing a series on memorable finds. Today's memorable find, is one of several reales found on a particularly memorable day.
In fact, it was the year Eastern Airlines went out of business. Eastern Airlines was a major airlines based in Miami, and it had a lot to do with me moving to Florida. I did some contract work for them, developing pilot training software for the Auto Flight Control System on the A300s they just purchased from Airbus. Pilots that had been flying 727s needed training for the A300s. As a result of my contract work, Eastern made me a job offer, and it was a good thing I didn't take it because they went bankrupt about a year or two later.
It was also the year of the protests at Tiananmen Square. Around 100,000 students gathered in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall came down in November.
Just before Christmas, I think it was probably Dec. 23, I was driving north from the Fort Lauderdale area to visit my parents in North Florida and decided to stop at Fort Pierce to break up the drive with a little metal detecting.
It was cold that day. It must have bene close to freezing, because later I hit some ice I95 up around Daytona.
I pulled into the parking lot at John Brooks. There was not a single person there. The wind was blowing and it was cold.
I did a search to see if my memory was right. I found the following, which seems to support what I thought.
From December 22-26, 1989, Florida
experienced one of the most severe cold
waves in its history with record-breaking
temperatures, snow, ice, sleet, and hard
freezes. Claiming at least 26 lives, power
and transportation were shut down over
much of Florida, with heavy losses in the
agricultural industry (Figure 1). See extreme-cold-factsheet.pdf (floridahealth.gov)
In those days, I still had good cold tolerance, because I hadn't been in Florida very long. I had my turtle neck sweater on, which I used to wear when I went ice skating up north, my driving gloves, and a toboggan (knit hat) that I pulled down over my ears.
When I walked up over the dunes and got the full force of the wind, it was COLD. My wife decided to go back to the car where she remained the entire time I hunted.
The beach was cut. I started metal detecting. I was headed north. One half reale popped up. Then another and another.
I looked back. Another detectorist showed up, but after a few seconds in the blowing wind, he just shook his head, and headed back to the car without detecting at all.
Up near where the old Christmas tree was, I dug the half reale shown above. it was better than most, and any others I got that day. There was a dead tree where people used to hang beach junk. Thas was referred to as the Christmas tree. I think it was during the 2004 storms that it disappeared.
Half reales usually don't show the date and mint marks. Thie one shown at the top of this post, shows a partial date, mint and assayers mark. I thought I could make the date out as 1714, but am just sure about the 171.
You can see part of the Phillip monogram and the pomegranate.
I found several reales that day, which is the first time I found so many in such a short hunt. In fact, up until that time, I hadn't found many at all. That and the cold weather made it a very memorable day. I probably could have found two or three times the number I found if I would have been able to spend more time. I doubt that I even spent an hour that day, because I wanted to get to my parent's home before it was too late and my wife was sitting in the car.
I remember showing the finds to my parents when I got there, and I remember that hunt well thirty or so years later.
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We are having some nice low tides and some small surf.
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| Source: nhc.noaa.gov |
There is one area on the National Hurricane Center map that could develop into a depression later in the week.
Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net