9/27/25 Report - Big Surf for Treasure Coast. Atocha Coin Finds. Testing Gold. Eureka! Gold Crown & Bathtub. Lead Leads.

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

Recent Atocha Finds.
Source: Email from Mel Fisher's Treasures Orgnaization.

The last few days on the Atocha site have been busy! Divers uncovered an exciting discovery — what appears to be a pair of scissors along with a silver coin. To date, approximately 30 pairs of scissors have been discovered on the Atocha and Margarita sites.

Today, the Dare crew has recovered two more coins! As you can see from the picture, these pieces are much smaller than the well-known 8 reales.

Two Coins Recently Found on the Atocha Site.

The above photos and text is from an email from the Mel Fisher's Treasure organization.

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Over the years I often mentioned in this blog about lead being a good sign that there might be gold nearby.  That opinion came from my own experiences and observations..  

Both metals are relatively dense, bt not extremely close in density.  I'm not sure that it is just because of density.  There could possibly be something else to it.  Lead is often found in the form of musket balls or sinkers whether that is significant or not, I don't know.  It just seems that they are so often found not too far apart. They seem to end up at similar depths and locations.  Of course, there isn't a perfect correlation.  You don't always find gold when you find lead, but it seems that there is a better chance.  

I was somewhat surprised to recently read somewhere that Mel Fisher often said, 'Lead leads to gold!"  I lost track of where I read that but if I find it again, I'll post the source.

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I just received the following email from Mark G. concerning testing gold.

... I have several items I would like to be gold but they may be brass. I bought the acid test kit for silver and gold testing however what I am finding is that brass will act very similar to gold in the 10K acid test. If something is marked then there is no question or need to test however pieces that have been in the surf can degrade especially silver and some 10K gold and loose there markings. I do several checks of course first; magnet if not magnetic then I scratch if no base metal then acid test. Be aware if you rub a plated piece on the stone the gold plate will test positive so visual check is necessary. So what is the next best tester? I asked copilot for an affordable gold tester I could buy on Amazon, there are several:

Below are the best gold testers as provided to Mark by Copilot.

Mark also provided the instructions for density testing, but I won't include all those here.  If you want you can look them up, but I doubt many people are going to try that method.  It isn't the easiest method, particularly when the items are small.  Surface tension is one problem, and, as you all know, gold is seldom pure, so you would be measuring an alloyed metal.

I should also say that some gold items are marked incorrectly.  Not often, but it does happen.  

You might remember the story about Archimedes taking a bath and having a Eureka moment when thought of a way to test a gold crown.  I don't know how many years it has been since first hearing that story, but it must have been in grade school or high school. Maybe it was the bathtub and gold crown, or maybe the "Eureka" exclamation. 

If you went to school in more recent years, you might know that story, so here it is as presented in a Scientific American piece.

Let's begin with the story: the local tyrant contracts the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes to detect fraud in the manufacture of a golden crown. Said tyrant, name of Hiero, suspects his goldsmith of leaving out some measure of gold and replacing it with silver in a wreath dedicated to the gods. Archimedes accepts the challenge and, during a subsequent trip to the public baths, realizes that the more his body sinks into the water, the more water is displaced--making the displaced water an exact measure of his volume. Because gold weighs more than silver, he reasons that a crown mixed with silver would have to be bulkier to reach the same weight as one composed only of gold; therefore it would displace more water than its pure gold counterpart. Realizing he has hit upon a solution, the young Greek math whiz leaps out of the bath and rushes home naked crying "Eureka! Eureka!" Or, translated: "I've found it! I've found it!"


Several millennia later, the scientific world is replete with the exclamation, and many people have received inspiration in the shower. The mathematical conjectures of Henri Poincar¿, Einstein's theory of relativity, Newton getting dinged on the head with an apple and discovering gravity--all have been described as eureka moments. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a prose poem to science by that title and the prospectors of California's gold rush were so fond of the phrase that it crept into that state's motto. Even the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls its breaking scientific news site EurekAlert...

Here is the link for the rest of that piece.

Fact or Fiction?: Archimedes Coined the Term "Eureka!" in the Bath | Scientific American

The motto "Eureka" was adopted as part of the Great Seal of California during the 1849 California State Constitutional Convention. The phrase was fittingly adopted to symbolize the discovery of gold in California, which began in earnest in 1848 when James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill, sparking the California Gold Rush.

Seal of California.

I don't know how many of the 49ers were familiar with Archimedes and Classical Greek, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them did know about the practical applications of the Archimedes Principle and maybe even a bit Classical Greek. Of course, the term could have been a part of the English language by then.

I just did an ngram search on the frequency of use of the term "Eureka" in published materials.  Below is what I found.

It looks like the word was used a little in English language publications in the 1920s but really took off with the Gold Rush.

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Source: nhc.noaa.gov.

Besides Humberto, we now have tropical depression nine, which is predicted to become a hurricane.

Predicted Track of Tropical Depression Nine.
Source: nhc.noaa.gov.

The predicted track of Tropical Depression Nine takes it east of the Treasure Coast as a storm and then becoming a hurricane well north of us.

Surf Chart for the Fort Pierce Jetty Area from SurfGuru.com.
Source: nhc.noaa.gov.

This is interesting.  If you've been watching the surf chart the increased surf is predicted to arrive a little sooner, but now we see any even bigger surf several days out.

The 4 -7 surf will help, but it would be really nice to get that early November 8 - 10 feet.  That is getting up there.  We had something like that later in November in both 2020 and 2022, if I correctly recall.

Anyhow, I'd be getting my equipment ready.

Good hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net