Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Recent Finds by Mark G. |
Mark G. sent me these photos with the following email about his recent metal detecting outing and finds.
You’ve done a few post on using the cameras for tracking beach erosion. I look at the cameras every day mostly local to me, Jensen Beach and Bathtub. November although not real stormy was a sand moving month overall and the beaches changed in dramatical fashion. You mentioned in one post that the cameras don’t have good depth perception and that is true it is very hard to see the heights of the scallops and depths of the cuts. I am always amazed when I look at the camera think I know where to hunt then actually go to the beach and it’s totally different.
This email is kind of in hindsight because I had written an email about my hunt at Bathtub Beach November 6th but lost it somehow couldn’t find it got frustrated and dropped it however your post today with the south end of Bathtub triggered me to try again. The far south shot of bathtub today is actually sanded in from where it was in early November. I was watching the waves cut into bank where the large pipe sticks vertically out of the water. That pipe usually sticks out of the sand on the dry beach about a foot and during the height of summer was actually covered completely in sand. Around the sixth of November after watching for a while at dead low tide that pipe stood out of the water about 12 feet, the area around it and that horizontal pipe sticking out of the bank to the right were exposed rebar and several stumps obviously cut down trees as large as 3 feet in diameter exposed. I said to myself it’s time to get in there and find some gold. You can see in the photo I only found lead and coins but the interesting thing is I found about 2 pounds of lead and some of the coins in a very small area about 12 feet in diameter right in between those 2 pipes. When I got time to go back for a second look I could see on the camera another detector there already so I went somewhere else. I convinced myself the reason there were no gold rings there because it may not have been a popular swimming area because of the debris and the reason for all the fishing weights was all the snags in the water lots of them. Never the less my diligence watching the cameras paid off, the theory of finding heavy metal was correct just not the gold.
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| Clip from Bathtub Beach Cam as Submitted by Mark G. |
Thanks for sharing Mark.
I know how it is to get frustrated by losing messages that you took time to compose. It happens to me much too often. It is no fun to spend a couple hours on a post and then end up losing it. It does happen.
I wonder how many millions of tons of lead in the water and on the beaches. You'd think more fish would die from being struck by lead sinkers or lead poisoning than are caught.
Here is nice little chart on metal densities.
Lead and gold are both towards the bottom of the chart but there is still a sizable difference between them, yet I've found them very often located in near proximity in the field.
There are other factors to be considered. For example, finds are often alloys, which changes the density of an object. Gold objects often contain some copper, but copper is also fairly dense. On the other hand, you have those stinkin zinc pennies, which are 97.5% zinc and the rest copper, but that isn't all of that story.
If you look at beach found zinc pennies, you'll often see corrosion and bubbliing of the surface and also encrustation. The surface adheres to sand. That changes how the object will behave on the beach. Those things make them act as if they were even less dense than the metallic composition would suggest. The surface area and surface characteristics of an object will also affect how it moves and therefore where it will eventually be found on a beach or in the water. The point being that it isn't only a matter of an metals object.
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One of the country’s rarest coins is slightly rarer than even expert coin collectors believed. After the surprise discovery of a long-lost 1804 dollar (aka the "King of American Coins" ), the rarity’s total known count now stands at 16...This 1804 dollar isn’t only famous for its rarity, but its history... In 1834, his administration solicited sets of these dollar coins to give as gifts to various heads of state around the world. But since it had been around 30 years since the United States Mint produced any new silver dollars, the Department of Treasury simply made a new die cast for another small run of coins dated 1804.
However, there was one problem. Officials at the time weren’t aware that 1804 coins didn’t technically exist. Instead, the original “1804 dollars” were actually made using the prior year’s die cast. This meant that any coins minted in 1804 still featured 1803 on their front side. Thanks to the oversight, the diplomatic gifts technically became the only silver dollars ever made to feature the year of 1804...
Here is the link for more about that.
A long lost silver dollar may be worth $5 million | Popular Science
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Each question posed to an AI chatbot such as Grok requires far more power than an ordinary Good search — possibly up to ten times more.
Computing has become very wasteful. In the earlier days of computing, computer memory was very expensive, and programmers programmed for efficiency. A good programmer would write a very compact program that would take up little memory but do a lot. It took some smarts. The same program might take up ten times as much space to accomplish the same thing if it was not designed as well. These days there is tons of waste. Hypertext markup language is terribly wasteful. I can't believe how remarkably wasteful it is when I see the code. Now this AI stuff raises the inefficiency to an entirely new level. Totally ridiculous. The developers have been spoiled by an abundance of memory, processing capacity and energy. They act like the resources are unlimited, and maybe they are, but I think it could all be done smarter and much more efficiently.
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The surf chart hasn't changed much.
The morning high tides are big lately.
I'll have to finish up my series on coin movement soon.
And I also need to get my electrolysis going again. I meant to yesterday but didn't get around to it.
Good hunting,
Treausreguide@comcast.net