Written by the Treasureguide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report
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| Two Rings Found Thursday. |
The smaller ring is definitely silver, but the other ring has me confused at this point. I originally thought it was a copper alloy.
Not only is the small silver ring badly corroded but it also shows a lot of the white calcareous deposits, which tells something of its history in the wild.
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| Corroded Silver Ring with Calcareous Deposits. |
The other ring I thought was copper alloy. It had a heavy patina so I decided to check to see what was underneath the heavy patina.
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| Closeup of Two Sections of Larger Ring With Heavy Patina. On the Right You See a Small Area Where the Patina Was Removed. |
The metal underneath was white! That surprised me. It stood up well to 10K gold test acid. I never saw a gold ring with that kind of patina. I'm going to have it tested another way because right now, I'm just not sure about that one.
Somebody asked me about my hunt that day, so I'll tell you a little more about it.
First, I stopped at one beach and walked a long ways looking for a promising place to detect. I didn't find a place that I wanted to spend any time, so quckly moved onto the next beach without doing any real metal detecting.
The next beach I just looked at before again quickly moving on. I didn't even take out my detector at that beach. A visual scan convinced me to move on.
The third beach I came to looked more promising. There was a big cut, but whiteish renourishment sand still protected the dunes, but low down near the water line I saw an area that looked worth detecting.
I found a spot, which happened to be close to the beach access and spent my time in a relatively small area where some shells were scattered on the lower beach. It wasn't really a shell pile, but unlike the rest of the beach, which showed nothing but sand, had some shells that had been left along the lower beach.
I spend my time on that area, only going a little farther south and north just to check the boundaries of what I saw as the most promising area. I spent very little time outside that area - just enough to do a quick check to see if it extended beyond the area showing the surface shells.
So that one area showed some early promise when I dug a modern quarter that had a heavy dark patina. The same area kept producing finds, including a few scattered sinkers and other fishing items (partly because it was almost right in front of the beach access) as well as some other miscellaneous items. A few more items were found along with several more modern U.S. coins.
When the water is coming and going over an area like that, it is difficult to be confident that you covered the area well. The productive area was maybe thirty yards north to south and maybe five or ten yards east/west, so that gave a relatively small area to cover, but I went back and forth over it maybe six or seven times sometimes switching to pinpoint mode especially later in the session and depending upon how the water was coming and going.
The main point to this is that I scanned a lot of area before deciding where to spend my detecting time and then spent my time going back over that small area, which kept providing signs that it was the place to be. Overall, I didn't spend a lot of time metal detecting and kept it confined to a small but promising area.
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| Surf Chart for Fort Pierce Inlet Area from Surfguru.com. |
As the surf backs off, you will be able to metal detect some of the areas near the water line better.
We'll likely get some more find reports when things settle down.
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Here are some links to some interesting articles in the news.
The first is on the false-hat operation that I mentioned as soon as I saw it.
Illegal lab in California carried bioengineered mice, infectious agents (usatoday.com)
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