Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
This morning I started thinking about some of those times when I was surprised by the quantity of the things I found. Today I'll take a little trip down memory lane and briefly recount some of those memorable hunts that taught me a lesson or two.
I'll start down south in my earlier days of metal detecting. The first is a two-parter that occurred on the west end of Key Biscayne after Hurricane Andrew.
While Andrew didn't cause much beach erosion around Miami, one rocky outcrop where I had never hunted much before turned into a carpet of silver. Normally the area was covered by sand and weeds and brush, but on this day the sand had been washed away down to the underlying coral. I never saw people there, but evidently in earlier days it was a popular location. The silver was thick. Almost all the coins and jewelry were older. Other than the pennies and nickels the coins were silver. The jewelry was too.
I saw that they built a new walkway to that spot, so it is probably visited by more people these days.
Nearby and not far away on Key Biscayne, on the other side of black mud and mangroves, I was digging coins along the water line when I discovered old bottles in the mangroves, evidently uncovered or deposited there by Hurricane Andrew. That was my introduction to bottle hunting.
On Virginia Key, just across Bear Cut from the spot I just described, there was another spot that wasn't much visited. I wandered into the water near a rock jetty one day and found a deep hole where I quickly found several nice pieces of gold jewelry. It was a very small area, maybe no bigger than eight feet in diameter, but in that dip there was a lot of gold jewelry. Since then, Viginia Key has been renovated, and I think it is now a more popular and busy area.
After one hurricane, I forget which one now, I went to John Loyd State Park and found a long and deeply eroded cliff below which I detected fifteen rings in a four-hour period. I understand that metal detecting is now prohibited in John Lloyd State Park. I also liked detecting in Whiskey Creek in John Lloyd.
At Fort Lauderdale, the area across from Bahia Mar just north of where the old inlet was and not far from where an old fort was located, the sand in the shallow water was washed away. Every square foot of the shallow water presented a good target. I remember telling Kevin Reilly, of Reilly's Treasured Gold, that in four hours I found twenty dollars in just clad quarters, but there was a lot of gold found that day. The coins were just in the way. That situation lasted two days before it suddenly disappeared. I often regret not working that area harder before it disappeared.
Moving up to Jupiter Beach, the dunes just south of the inlet were really eroded one day when I dug old coins for a few hours. Nothing really remarkable showed up that day. Just the old coins, but no cobs. It was the quantity that was striking. Dave, who lived nearby and detected that beach daily and had found many cobs from the Jupiter Wreck on the beach, showed up as I was leaving and vowed to me if that happened again, he would be the first one there.
Then there was the day when I showed up at a beach and old fossils were scattered all along the front a beach for hundreds of yards. Big pieces from mammoths and whales too. Never saw anything like that again. If it ever happened again, I missed it.
Then there were the hurricanes of 2004. I can't believe I didn't get in any metal detecting then, but there was a lot of damage and other things I had to attend to. Nonetheless, the entire length of the Indian River was covered with old bottles from Fort Pierce to Jensen and probably farther. That was one of those situations when I wish I had been able to go to the beach to metal detect, but at the same time I wish I had been able to spend time picking up bottles even though I didn't know nearly as much about bottles back then. I know there would have been great finds.
There was that time I told about before when I was traveling from Fort Lauderdale to Palm Coast for Christmas and just made a quick stop at John Brooks. It was freezing that day. I actually hit ice on a bridge up by Daytona. When I stopped at John Brooks I found several cobs in a very short time - probably no more than twenty or thirty minutes of detecting. I didn't stay long because of the cold and my wife waiting in the car and needing to complete the trip to my parent's house. I think it was Christmas Eve or the day before that. Anyhow, the cobs were there in great numbers, and I can only guess what I would have found if I had spent more time detecting that day.
Well, there seem to be few themes. It isn't surprising that many of those events were after hurricanes or other unusual weather events.
Those types of events are very rare in my experience. They only come along once every few years, maybe once a decade, and in some cases once in a lifetime.
It seems I always regret not really hitting it harder when it happens. And that regret sticks with me. I always wonder what I could have found. And after the years have passed, I come to realize how rare those opportunities are. After gaining more knowledge, I realize how much I missed and what I should have done.
When those things do happen, they catch you off guard. They surprise you. Sometimes you aren't prepared in one way or another. On one occasion I remember I was expecting a normal hunt and wasn't bothered by the fact that my detector wasn't fully charged. I had to quit early in the midst of one of those rare events because my detector ran down. That was a stupid and much regretted mistake.
You might not expect much when you go out, but you should be prepared for a big surprise. They might not happen often, but you don't want to miss out when they do happen.
Most of those events were fairly short lived and came to a sudden end. One way to say it, is make hay when the sun shines. But for detectorists, the time to make hay is more often when the wind blows.
Or as Shakespeare through Brutus said,
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...
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Good hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net