Next Level Beach Gold
By Bill Gallagher
5200 Words
My first association with GPAA was during a Rock and Gem show in Alexander City, Alabama, sometime around 2002. I was a camping dealer at that outdoor rock show for the first time, having wandered in by following a lapidary classified ad in one of the publications, and some signs the club had put out on the local roads. The AL GPAA club was my close neighbor during the four days of the show, and I remember thinking "These folks know how to have fun!
I did very well at the show, and learned a lot. I did not join GPAA then because I was just passing through Alabama, on my way west with a load of Tampa Bay and Withlacoochee agatized coral from Florida, and I was adjusting to many new things all at once, too many new things, really. Even so the members took care to guide me to gold in the west to the best of their knowledge, and I later found out that their information was top notch. During that rock show we swapped many stories and a whole lot of information beneficial across the board.
Truth be told, I am a very avid gold seeker, but I've had better success in all my pursuits by trying hard to escape the box, to think in unconventional ways. That is how you discover virgin territory, and sometimes its right under our noses, but the box, the expected actions and conditionings we are all susceptible to, even prey to, is really a CAGE, and its the greatest hindrance of all.
When I told the GPAA members of my successes with gold they were very intrigued and we talked well into the night every night. Many tales of Alabama gold were told, and with me there, tales of Florida gold as well. One of the Alabama gold stories was somewhat related to my metal detecting experiences in Florida, good common ground. You see, I search out swimming areas, and dive with underwater metal detectors, or wade with floating screens when searching for my particular type of gold, and it is like a public vault open at times, but mostly closed. There are things that can be done to open the vault mechanically, of course, but there are never guarantees, thats for sure.
One of the GPAA members spoke about panning for very small gold in a creek on one of the Alabama leases, and it was kind of slow going, but who cares, right? The weather was nice, the creeks water level was good but not too much, and actual peace was being had, a wonderful rarity too. Our gold panner noticed a rope swing nearby indicating this place was popular for swimming when the water was higher. Then in his pan he got a very nice surprise, a plain mans 14k gold wedding band with nothing indicating ownership. A thought impressed itself on his mind then and there: It would take many many hours of panning powder gold in this creek to equal the gold in that plain mans wedding band. A fact.
I did my best to convey good information to the group for their benefit in the future, and also gave them a crash course about gems found in AL creeks, up to and including diamonds which were scraped off the tops of kimberlite pipes up north (Creating shallow lakes) when glacial activity was happening, then dragged south for many hundreds, even thousands of miles. A very large diamond was discovered by a farm family in an Alabama field in the early 1900s, and was purchased by Tiffanys for what was considered at that time be a stupendous bunch of bux. I have an associate who spent summers in northern California, dredging creeks for gold after his Vietnam service was over, and he too found a very nice and distinctive natural diamond while dredging, that was back in the early 1970s.
Eyes are for seeing, remember.
**************
My experiences with metal detectors began early. I grew up in Hialeah, then Miramar, Florida, meaning I spent more and more time at the beach as I aged. When I was 8 or so the family was picnicking at Haulover Beach and Dad met a guy he worked with at Eastern Airlines. The man had a very early metal detector. That was my first sight of those money finding machines, and I got one myself for my birthday a couple years later, an early all-metal detector which the janitor at my elementary school liked to borrow to find pipes, until the school bought him one of his own. That was 1969 or 1970.
I found many good things over time but was young and did not have a realistic idea as to the length, width, and breadth of experience one can undergo if one is fortunate enough to live. I found a few good sources of straight-up information concerning metal detectors and the art thereof, and those got me going faster. They were typewritten and copied front and back and sold in the classifieds of some treasure hunting magazines. Saved me years.
The first underwater detectorist I knew lived in Port Richey Florida, and I met him at a rock show north of Tampa in the late 1970s early 1980s. He had the first Garrett Sea Hunter I ever saw, and in his first year of getting to know the machine he found over 80 gold rings at abandoned swimming sites along the Gulf coast of Florida. There are many other things found too, lots and lots of coins, if you dive at a swimming site thats been abandoned and forgotton.
During the middle 1980s I worked for Federal Express in Pompano Beach Florida, and Kevin Reillys Treasured Gold Metal Detecting Shop was on the same road as my Federal Express station, about two miles away. Kevin was the first to get me in the water, around 1986 or 1987, because he hunted the Fort Lauderdale strip for a few hours almost every morning, and he found incredible things while wading with his underwater detector. He also manufactured other equipment like scoops and heavy duty shovels there. My first time in the water I had to take my Whites hipmount land detector and verrrrry carefully float the box in an inner tube, while using the telescoping waterproof coil to wade in very calm water. It was a whole 'nother country, there in the water, and I had to learn to wear a heavy weight belt, and good sneakers or even boots, and that first underwater coil had such a positive buoyancy I had to weight it too, with a stone strapped to the pipe near the coil. All very cumbersome and involved, taxing. But the first target I found at Fort Lauderdale beach while wading in the water was a silver ring! I continued my efforts in the water with fair success, though the gold rings still came from dry sand beach erosion during that earliest time of my water hunting career.
Around 1989 I eased off of metal detecting in the water because I left that area, heading north to Tampa. I stayed abreast of technology and worked hard to get scuba certified and to collect the large amount of equipment my personal agenda required. Occasionally I got to go east-coasting with friends after a storm but I never found any Spanish stuff and only saw one cut silver coin found. I saw some nice local collections, but none of that happened during my trips to Wabasso and environs.
Then came Andrew. I was one of 5 Tampa metal detectorists waiting for Hurricane Andrew in a hotel on the beach just south of Sebastion Inlet, and we were all glued to TV weather. For awhile it looked as if we would have to take to the beach in our rain gear to avoid official evacuating agencies, but Andrew went south, as it were, hitting around Miami instead of Sebastion inlet. I tried to talk my fellow travelers into a quick Miami run, I was sure that whole coast from Boca Raton to south Miami was in bonanza times as far as recovery of lost jewelry was concerned, and I was correct, though there were no takers among the rest of my group. But the coastal change Andrew wreaked was fairly long term, as I was to see a little later.
Events coalesced for me around 1994. I found myself in South Florida again with steady evening work, and people who liked what I was up to in my spare time. That means help. I obtained my first Whites surfmaster underwater metal detector and was now also fully equipped to scuba dive, owning two tanks, two regulators, and all the other stuff necessary, like a PADI card. Walking across the beach all geared up, carrying even my dive flag, kept me in decent physical shape though it felt like I was the clumsiest thing in sight, which I was. Once in the water all the gear becomes almost weightless, and as I went I learned to do with less.
I had only a little information to go on concerning diving with a detector, and the first few times bordered on the hilarious until I worked some kinks out, and I got much better quickly. On my first dive I found gold though, imagine my surprise. It was a religious medallion in a deep rocky hole right in front of a monster sand bar, 14k, 1/2 ounce or so, along with lots of other good stuff, because underwater Hurricane Andrew had decimated beach replenishment that had been constructed since the early 1970s. There were large deep holes everywhere out there in the water, right off the beach, exposed bedrock where class rings and wedding bands and gold chains were sometimes found by sight, without the aid of a metal detector. I tried to dive twice a day, at least five times a week. It was arduous. I found a pound of gold jewelry the first year, and two pounds the second. Thats a lot, even just averaging 12k. Overall four diamond rings. Some pieces were salable as jewelry, much better money. Silver jewelry and coinage was plentiful too; in fact thats how I got into melting metals. I sold all my gold scrap at the Seybold Building in Miami, I was referred by a friend, and the best I ever got was around 280 per ounce for 24k gold, and it felt like a lot at the time.
I also really witnessed the process of aggregation for the first time on the south Florida beaches, what a thing, eh? Aggregation is actually a well defined science, useful in mining separations and other things, though it occurs naturally in all bodies of water/liquid where there is movement of any kind. By introducing order into aggregation one may accomplish much greater results. Things like ultrasound and pulsed vibratory energies, when coupled with textured tabling surfaces and other things, can get a lot of fine work done cheaply and quickly. Cavitation is a many splendored thing. Natural bodies of water behave this way as a matter of course, it is what creates placer deposits, and its a good thing to know when trying to escape the box.
**************************
The first gold ring I found on south Florida beaches was a 14k mans ring that had a beat up sapphire in it, and said "AL" across the front. Thanks Al. Like many many other good dry-beach finds it was acquired at the foot of a beach cut, that step off on the beach you sometimes see that is caused by a rather orderly type of beach erosion. What happens at a beach cut is the waves carry debris up the beach to hit that little step (Sometimes its a wall versus a step) and most of the waves energy gets spent right there, in something of a rare way, not a real natural way, quickly, there is high order to it. When a wave hits that wall it drops everything it is carrying at its front, and most times thats just rocks, but if there is a shipwreck nearby there will always be detritus from that until the sea totally powders it over a few thousand years. If it was a place where a lot of people swam over a long time then so much better, because people lose things in the water, and these losses accrue with time then become aggregated together, and that is a fact of life, it is inviolable. It is the nature of the medium.
When someone is metal detecting on the dry beach their finds are one of two things: direct loss on the beach, or loss in the water which the sea sometimes regurgitates back up onto the beach. That latter type of finds, the things lost in water, have of course been subject to aggregation, and they are orderly in their deposition, whereas dry beach losses are deposited willy nilly everywhere. If there are walkways or other places where dry beach traffic has been funneled then there will be a lot of stuff concentrated at those points on the dry beach, and under any walkways if they are slatted. Dry beach hunting is a matter of being thorough, walking in grid patterns, slowly listening for deep old signals that others have missed, and interpeting good signals amongst a lot of accumulated trash.
If you are hunting close to the waterline, or, better, between the high water and the low water point at low tide, then you are in with the sorted stuff, the stuff the ocean has already had its way with. Look at the rocks, and see how they are deposited. Notice the interesting patterns left each time the tides change, and try to understand what is causing the patterns. Seek rocks the size and weight of what you are looking for. If you are careful you many times will see a coin or two in the open, and thats where you start metal detecting. Move out from any find in a spiraling circle, because tides and waves throw coins in "Sprays", there is order to it, and the high tide line can be a bonanza too, under the right circumstances. Many people do not like to detect along a seaweed line, because a lot of debris gets tangled and that means trash. If you are going to hunt around the water trash is something you better get used to, and its always good to remove the trash and record your good deeds with pictures, in case anyone wants to make trouble for you. Be an environmental asset, its the high ground.
High tide lines full of seaweed are bothersome, but contain treasure as well as trash and are generally overlooked. A Tampa man arrived at Wabasso late one time, after the storm, after the thousands with metal detectors, but he saw they had ignored the high tide line so he began a favorite technique of his called "Kicking Trash". That meant kicking the seaweed out of the way and detecting beneath it. Frankie G. then proceeded to find a Spanish emerald and gold pendant that was initially valued at 40 thou. True Story, well known among Tampa treasure hunters.
Low tide lines can be even better, especially if you can wade out a little with your detector. That first step out in the water, that little drop off at every active beach just after you step in, its an underwater cut, and though it moves with the tides, it acts just like a cut on the dry beach, and things get deposited all along it regularly. It also digs as it works, 24-7, non-stop, a supremely powerful machine.
A lady attorney in St. Petersburg Florida called a friend of mine who was a Whites metal detector dealer in Tampa and said there was a reward of $1000 cash for her lost ring, it was a big diamond heirloom, she had lost it in the water at a beach down the street from her house, was he interested? He said yeah, and called me. We took my old Chevy Impala across the bridge loaded down with gear for a treasure hunt. The plan was that Gary would dive out by the marker the lady had left (A smart thing), and I would wade, working the drop-off at the waters edge. I had a big scoop I made and a Whites Surfmaster and a shorty wetsuit -- Gary was in full scuba gear. The two largest problems to success in this were going to be the weather, it was blustery, cold, and the surf was up, as it had been since the loss, and there was also the fact that we were the third party to search for the ring, other divers had been out, and it was not doubtful that some divers would pocket the $10,000.00 ring in preference to the $1000.00 reward.
I worked that first drop-off cut right off the beach, and it was messy and difficult. I had dug my six or seventh flip top when Gary came in with a spent tank and a load of depression. He'd tied off to the cement block the lady had left where she thought she lost the ring, and gone out in spirals around that point, but to no avail. Gary started shedding the tank and getting his other tank ready. I got another signal, sounded like a really nice flip top. I dug and dug and swallowed sea water and sand, and finally was able to discern that the target was now in my scoop and not in the hole I had dug. I left the water to take a break too, and had the scoop and detector with me. My weight belt was real heavy there on land, let me tell you.
Gary was just donning his second tank when I dumped what was in my scoop, and there, right on top, was the ring. There was bedlam, people were hollering and the lady attorney came running down the street with tears in her eyes. People on the beach were shaking my hand and Gary and I were both really glad we didn't have to go into the mushy surf again for another round. We followed the lady to the bank and she counted out 10 one hundred dollar bills, 5 for each of us. Of all the things I did while I was a member of the Tampa Archaeological club, that thing right there made me more famous locally than anything else.
***********************
Finding gold chains with metal detectors, or any chains for that matter, is an exercise in futility. There is usually not enough surface area presented to the coils field for a metal detector to induce proper eddy currents in the metal to analyze. In English: the links are usually too small to create a signal. This does not mean that chains cannot be found, but truth be told there are many many chains lost that will never be recovered because they have already been ground to dust, or are well on their way to it. The only chains I have ever found with a detector were attached to medallions and it was the medal I detected not the chain. I have heard of others finding what are called "Chain Balls" with their metal detectors, and those are weird formations where the ocean has sorted chains together by virtue of their weight and makeup, again, through Aggregation, and then the things got all tangled together, forming a glob big enough to metal detect. I myself have seen small chain balls formed from a single chain, its generally how an ocean will treat a chain on its way to obliteration, a natural occurence.
I did find one loose chain one day, and it was a killer. If I had known what I know now, about aggregation, I would have raked that sandbar face as deeply as possible with a plain iron rake head, because there were probably more there.
It was after Andrew, just north of Dania pier where the old pier and swimming beach used to be. Big deep holes, lots of rock bottom, and sandbars moving radically with every tide. I found so many sets of keys, and so many lead sinkers, I was literally scrapping brass and lead. On one such sandbar face I got a good signal, it turned out to be an aluminum can, but on the way to digging it up I became ensnared in the longest 18k gold chain I have ever found. Happy Day. The signal was of course still in the hole and I dug it hoping for a Mr. T medallion but it was, afterall, just another aluminum can.
On another day, on another sandbar face, I got a deeper signal so large it had to another can. Because I follow my own rules I was bound and determined to get that can out of there and dispose of it properly. I'm serious, but also because large trash can mask smaller items below, and it was a good spot. Always remove trash for your own good too.
I dug and dug and dug. Underwater is like in space, when you push something you move backwards more than moving the thing you push. This makes digging by hand a really grueling chore full of reflux, angst, and general discomfort. You can hand fan down to a certain point but then, not. Its a hand scoop at a time, and it wears. I kept digging deeper into the loose sand and the target kept getting louder. Finally I checked the hole with the detector again, and the target was no longer in the hole. I myself was in the hole a good ways, and I looked backward under my arm at the pile of sand I had dug, expecting to see an aluminum can. But no, this time it was an 18K arm bangle with Hebrew karat markings! Not your usual piece of bottom cobble.
So you never know what you will find.
Chains are good to look for when searching with your eyes on an eroded swimming beach. Sometimes on sunny days, in the long shallow waves that sweep up the beach for a long way, chains can be spotted in the flow, but you must be quick. I have heard of chains being found in some places like Miami beach after storms, all tangled up in seaweed at the high tide line. That I got from a lifeguard who I befriended during my time with Mother Ocean, and that guy was really cool. I had come onto his beach before sunrise, and was in the water checking out new places before the lifeguards even came on duty. On that Miami beach it was a lot different than Dania or Hallandale where I usually dove, though pickings were getting slim at my regular spots so I was ranging out. There were large troughs dug into the sand by the tides at this beach, all in lines outward to the sea, looking like sand dunes more than anything. I didn't find anything at that beach, although I could see there were a lot of holes that had been dug over time by other hunters. After I finished diving the lifeguard met me as I came out of the water, and he was curious.
"Did you find anything"? he asked.
I shook my head in the negative while getting untangled from my gear.
"NOTHING?"
Like I was a slacker schlep or something.
"I saw a lot of holes dug by people who probably did find things," I replied in consternation.
He smiled, explaining those were his holes, he had done well on this beach in his off duty hours, using a Brownies rig and a high power PI detector. He said the PI was the only mistake he made. He had some money so he decided that he would buy the best most powerfullest metal detector he could find. He researched and researched and finally spent 3 thousand on a brand I had never heard of. He said it picked up tire rims at 6 feet! I was like dude thats not a detector thats a magnetometer! Yes, he said, it was not as good as he would have liked with small targets. Once again I silently thanked Wallace Chandler for writing "Advanced Shallow Water Treasure Hunting". I did mention then to the lifeguard that it was a book worthy of perusal. It so happened that this Brownies 3rd Lung diver lifeguard treasure hunter guy had a buyer coming to look at his scrap gold that morning, and he showed me some. He reached below the seat of an unlocked and kind of shabby VW bug in the parking lot, and pulled out a styrofoam cup chock full of the most gaudy and expensive jewelry I ever saw in my life, crosses, stars of David, diamonds.
"So I guess movie stars swim at this beach sometimes, eh?" I asked.
"Used to, this is all old stuff uncovered by Andrew, your friend and mine. Seen any of the insurance guys yet?"
I said "No, whats that?"
"They see us out here finding stuff, they know the goldc buyers in Miami, and they have all these paid claims on lost jewelry, so they are sending out their divers to try to recoup some of their lost money. Be careful around those guys."
I nodded and we talked some more before I left.
Other than the insurance diver I eventually did meet, and that lifeguard, I met no other divers who were doing what we were doing at that time. I told one older diver about it, and suggested he work Haulover. He was smart. He did it. He was a happy diver ever after.
***********************
My mind is full of things I wish I had known back then. Its just the process of learning but sometimes it seems backwards. I try to convey information I could have used, and is still useful albeit under new conditions. There really is value here, otherwise you might as well read the funny papers.
The mistake our lifeguard made above, of possessing capital resources and therefore over-buying equipment is a common thread among us. We all have tales to tell, and its a fact that the equipment manufacturers make off with a large amount of the gold we find, when its all said and done.
Now I am not knocking the equipment people, I have been one myself on occasion, but things I have learned largely amount to this: getting the job done well, and safely, for the least amount of expenditure. And as we all know too, there will always be unexpected expenditures to eat up any profits, so why over-spend on equipment when things you can make work better and last longer? Wait until you absolutely have to have something before getting it. Age has made me realize that its usually better to think things out for a while before doing them, there are almost always better ways. Invent.
I think, like so much else, that over-buying is psychological, its a bar in the CAGE, we are trying to take the easiest way to stack the odds in our favor, the path of least resistance, of least effort. Usually that goes awry quickly, and things going bad tend to pick up an evil kind of momentum, erupting in spectacles of violent inefficiency truly awesome to see, and scary, though like slapstick comedy too. Its very difficult to know whether to laugh or cry sometimes, and its our ability to endure embarassment that defines us here on planet Earth, our toughness against the adversity we create for ourselves.
The best piece of equipment I ever learned to use is a screen, 3/8" is good, woven mining screen is best, and you can easily build a box for it out of four 24" two by fours, which you can then float with four empty 2-litre soda bottles that are laying around everywhere. And there you are on the high ground again, recycling is being an environmental asset, thats a win-win. Everything from mud bottom to sand can easily be scooped into your floating sifter with a regular shovel, although rice shovels or other strengthened diggers can be used and may last longer. I personally like a nice piece of heavy pipe welded to a heavy duty shovel head stiffened with heavy plate, but I am a monster. Always use a float on the handle or you will lose it. A piece of foam pipe insulation slid onto the handle works well.
I could get started today and busily finding silver and gold in the water for the cost of a floating screen, a couple decent shovels, and a weight belt. There are so many old piers in the water that can't be seen unless you walk right up on the nubs of the pilings at low tide, you could never screen around one percent of them in your life! And rotted pilings mean OLD pilings. Wherever boats were loaded and unloaded there is real treasure lost in the water there. You can go much deeper in the water with a shovel than a metal detector, usually.
Half of the items I found at Dania and Hallandale after Andrew could have been obtained in this way, with screens, and I could have gotten to the core of the situation much more quickly had I understood this. I could have pulled framed chainlink fence supporting 1/2" screen across the sand bars and low areas with a small motor boat and found a lot more. Its OK though, I use the heck out of what I know now, when I can, and it is more valuable all the time. I share too.
The thing that the vast majority can't seem to realize is that anywhere people have congregated over time there are what I call "Casually Lost Hoards". Sometimes, at old fair grounds or beach parks on lakes and oceans, the amount deposited in the casually lost hoard is truly gargantuan, unbelievable. If it was all gathered together, all the silver and gold lost, say, on Fort Lauderdale beach from the time people started partying there in the late 1800s, it would amount to a pile of treasure so large as to be unimaginable, it would make pirate treasure seem positively dinky. I can honestly say that my observations of this phenomenon are some of the most interesting observations of my life. My studies of archaeology only fortify that attitude. Places like European Roman Military camps, and even 1800s military camps I've located and detected in Florida, announce to any and all that huge amounts of very valuable items are lost anywhere people group together for any length of time, and because grouping together is what people do a lot, well you can see the answer already can't you?
fin
Photo explanations:
1. GPAA booth at Alexander City Alabama, c.2003.
2. A collage of some silver and gold jewelry found after hurricane Andrew on South Florida Beaches. From before the days of digital photos!
3. A regular 1920s Florida Beach Scene.
4. Author Bill Gallagher
5. The new and improved Dania Pier, Dania Beach, Florida.
Bibliography:
Beachcombers Handbook. Warren Merkitch, Karl von Mueller.
On Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau (Mentions the phenomenon of water aggregation in passing)
Advanced Shallow Water Treasure Hunting, Wallace Chandler
Diamonds In The Surf, Whites Electronics
treasurehuntingwithbillgallagher.blogspot.com
Author Bio:
Bill Gallagher has sold over 40 articles to Western and Eastern Treasures magazine, 1979-1995, and over 125 articles were sold to Lost Treasure magazine, 2013-2018. Other publications include but are not limited to World Of Treasures, Treasure Cache (Annual) and Lapidary Journal. Bill Gallagher lives near Akela New Mexico now and has a small mining camp and farm where he renders ore as a craft, and grows tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.
By Bill Gallagher
5200 Words
My first association with GPAA was during a Rock and Gem show in Alexander City, Alabama, sometime around 2002. I was a camping dealer at that outdoor rock show for the first time, having wandered in by following a lapidary classified ad in one of the publications, and some signs the club had put out on the local roads. The AL GPAA club was my close neighbor during the four days of the show, and I remember thinking "These folks know how to have fun!
I did very well at the show, and learned a lot. I did not join GPAA then because I was just passing through Alabama, on my way west with a load of Tampa Bay and Withlacoochee agatized coral from Florida, and I was adjusting to many new things all at once, too many new things, really. Even so the members took care to guide me to gold in the west to the best of their knowledge, and I later found out that their information was top notch. During that rock show we swapped many stories and a whole lot of information beneficial across the board.
Truth be told, I am a very avid gold seeker, but I've had better success in all my pursuits by trying hard to escape the box, to think in unconventional ways. That is how you discover virgin territory, and sometimes its right under our noses, but the box, the expected actions and conditionings we are all susceptible to, even prey to, is really a CAGE, and its the greatest hindrance of all.
When I told the GPAA members of my successes with gold they were very intrigued and we talked well into the night every night. Many tales of Alabama gold were told, and with me there, tales of Florida gold as well. One of the Alabama gold stories was somewhat related to my metal detecting experiences in Florida, good common ground. You see, I search out swimming areas, and dive with underwater metal detectors, or wade with floating screens when searching for my particular type of gold, and it is like a public vault open at times, but mostly closed. There are things that can be done to open the vault mechanically, of course, but there are never guarantees, thats for sure.
One of the GPAA members spoke about panning for very small gold in a creek on one of the Alabama leases, and it was kind of slow going, but who cares, right? The weather was nice, the creeks water level was good but not too much, and actual peace was being had, a wonderful rarity too. Our gold panner noticed a rope swing nearby indicating this place was popular for swimming when the water was higher. Then in his pan he got a very nice surprise, a plain mans 14k gold wedding band with nothing indicating ownership. A thought impressed itself on his mind then and there: It would take many many hours of panning powder gold in this creek to equal the gold in that plain mans wedding band. A fact.
I did my best to convey good information to the group for their benefit in the future, and also gave them a crash course about gems found in AL creeks, up to and including diamonds which were scraped off the tops of kimberlite pipes up north (Creating shallow lakes) when glacial activity was happening, then dragged south for many hundreds, even thousands of miles. A very large diamond was discovered by a farm family in an Alabama field in the early 1900s, and was purchased by Tiffanys for what was considered at that time be a stupendous bunch of bux. I have an associate who spent summers in northern California, dredging creeks for gold after his Vietnam service was over, and he too found a very nice and distinctive natural diamond while dredging, that was back in the early 1970s.
Eyes are for seeing, remember.
**************
My experiences with metal detectors began early. I grew up in Hialeah, then Miramar, Florida, meaning I spent more and more time at the beach as I aged. When I was 8 or so the family was picnicking at Haulover Beach and Dad met a guy he worked with at Eastern Airlines. The man had a very early metal detector. That was my first sight of those money finding machines, and I got one myself for my birthday a couple years later, an early all-metal detector which the janitor at my elementary school liked to borrow to find pipes, until the school bought him one of his own. That was 1969 or 1970.
I found many good things over time but was young and did not have a realistic idea as to the length, width, and breadth of experience one can undergo if one is fortunate enough to live. I found a few good sources of straight-up information concerning metal detectors and the art thereof, and those got me going faster. They were typewritten and copied front and back and sold in the classifieds of some treasure hunting magazines. Saved me years.
The first underwater detectorist I knew lived in Port Richey Florida, and I met him at a rock show north of Tampa in the late 1970s early 1980s. He had the first Garrett Sea Hunter I ever saw, and in his first year of getting to know the machine he found over 80 gold rings at abandoned swimming sites along the Gulf coast of Florida. There are many other things found too, lots and lots of coins, if you dive at a swimming site thats been abandoned and forgotton.
During the middle 1980s I worked for Federal Express in Pompano Beach Florida, and Kevin Reillys Treasured Gold Metal Detecting Shop was on the same road as my Federal Express station, about two miles away. Kevin was the first to get me in the water, around 1986 or 1987, because he hunted the Fort Lauderdale strip for a few hours almost every morning, and he found incredible things while wading with his underwater detector. He also manufactured other equipment like scoops and heavy duty shovels there. My first time in the water I had to take my Whites hipmount land detector and verrrrry carefully float the box in an inner tube, while using the telescoping waterproof coil to wade in very calm water. It was a whole 'nother country, there in the water, and I had to learn to wear a heavy weight belt, and good sneakers or even boots, and that first underwater coil had such a positive buoyancy I had to weight it too, with a stone strapped to the pipe near the coil. All very cumbersome and involved, taxing. But the first target I found at Fort Lauderdale beach while wading in the water was a silver ring! I continued my efforts in the water with fair success, though the gold rings still came from dry sand beach erosion during that earliest time of my water hunting career.
Around 1989 I eased off of metal detecting in the water because I left that area, heading north to Tampa. I stayed abreast of technology and worked hard to get scuba certified and to collect the large amount of equipment my personal agenda required. Occasionally I got to go east-coasting with friends after a storm but I never found any Spanish stuff and only saw one cut silver coin found. I saw some nice local collections, but none of that happened during my trips to Wabasso and environs.
Then came Andrew. I was one of 5 Tampa metal detectorists waiting for Hurricane Andrew in a hotel on the beach just south of Sebastion Inlet, and we were all glued to TV weather. For awhile it looked as if we would have to take to the beach in our rain gear to avoid official evacuating agencies, but Andrew went south, as it were, hitting around Miami instead of Sebastion inlet. I tried to talk my fellow travelers into a quick Miami run, I was sure that whole coast from Boca Raton to south Miami was in bonanza times as far as recovery of lost jewelry was concerned, and I was correct, though there were no takers among the rest of my group. But the coastal change Andrew wreaked was fairly long term, as I was to see a little later.
Events coalesced for me around 1994. I found myself in South Florida again with steady evening work, and people who liked what I was up to in my spare time. That means help. I obtained my first Whites surfmaster underwater metal detector and was now also fully equipped to scuba dive, owning two tanks, two regulators, and all the other stuff necessary, like a PADI card. Walking across the beach all geared up, carrying even my dive flag, kept me in decent physical shape though it felt like I was the clumsiest thing in sight, which I was. Once in the water all the gear becomes almost weightless, and as I went I learned to do with less.
I had only a little information to go on concerning diving with a detector, and the first few times bordered on the hilarious until I worked some kinks out, and I got much better quickly. On my first dive I found gold though, imagine my surprise. It was a religious medallion in a deep rocky hole right in front of a monster sand bar, 14k, 1/2 ounce or so, along with lots of other good stuff, because underwater Hurricane Andrew had decimated beach replenishment that had been constructed since the early 1970s. There were large deep holes everywhere out there in the water, right off the beach, exposed bedrock where class rings and wedding bands and gold chains were sometimes found by sight, without the aid of a metal detector. I tried to dive twice a day, at least five times a week. It was arduous. I found a pound of gold jewelry the first year, and two pounds the second. Thats a lot, even just averaging 12k. Overall four diamond rings. Some pieces were salable as jewelry, much better money. Silver jewelry and coinage was plentiful too; in fact thats how I got into melting metals. I sold all my gold scrap at the Seybold Building in Miami, I was referred by a friend, and the best I ever got was around 280 per ounce for 24k gold, and it felt like a lot at the time.
I also really witnessed the process of aggregation for the first time on the south Florida beaches, what a thing, eh? Aggregation is actually a well defined science, useful in mining separations and other things, though it occurs naturally in all bodies of water/liquid where there is movement of any kind. By introducing order into aggregation one may accomplish much greater results. Things like ultrasound and pulsed vibratory energies, when coupled with textured tabling surfaces and other things, can get a lot of fine work done cheaply and quickly. Cavitation is a many splendored thing. Natural bodies of water behave this way as a matter of course, it is what creates placer deposits, and its a good thing to know when trying to escape the box.
**************************
The first gold ring I found on south Florida beaches was a 14k mans ring that had a beat up sapphire in it, and said "AL" across the front. Thanks Al. Like many many other good dry-beach finds it was acquired at the foot of a beach cut, that step off on the beach you sometimes see that is caused by a rather orderly type of beach erosion. What happens at a beach cut is the waves carry debris up the beach to hit that little step (Sometimes its a wall versus a step) and most of the waves energy gets spent right there, in something of a rare way, not a real natural way, quickly, there is high order to it. When a wave hits that wall it drops everything it is carrying at its front, and most times thats just rocks, but if there is a shipwreck nearby there will always be detritus from that until the sea totally powders it over a few thousand years. If it was a place where a lot of people swam over a long time then so much better, because people lose things in the water, and these losses accrue with time then become aggregated together, and that is a fact of life, it is inviolable. It is the nature of the medium.
When someone is metal detecting on the dry beach their finds are one of two things: direct loss on the beach, or loss in the water which the sea sometimes regurgitates back up onto the beach. That latter type of finds, the things lost in water, have of course been subject to aggregation, and they are orderly in their deposition, whereas dry beach losses are deposited willy nilly everywhere. If there are walkways or other places where dry beach traffic has been funneled then there will be a lot of stuff concentrated at those points on the dry beach, and under any walkways if they are slatted. Dry beach hunting is a matter of being thorough, walking in grid patterns, slowly listening for deep old signals that others have missed, and interpeting good signals amongst a lot of accumulated trash.
If you are hunting close to the waterline, or, better, between the high water and the low water point at low tide, then you are in with the sorted stuff, the stuff the ocean has already had its way with. Look at the rocks, and see how they are deposited. Notice the interesting patterns left each time the tides change, and try to understand what is causing the patterns. Seek rocks the size and weight of what you are looking for. If you are careful you many times will see a coin or two in the open, and thats where you start metal detecting. Move out from any find in a spiraling circle, because tides and waves throw coins in "Sprays", there is order to it, and the high tide line can be a bonanza too, under the right circumstances. Many people do not like to detect along a seaweed line, because a lot of debris gets tangled and that means trash. If you are going to hunt around the water trash is something you better get used to, and its always good to remove the trash and record your good deeds with pictures, in case anyone wants to make trouble for you. Be an environmental asset, its the high ground.
High tide lines full of seaweed are bothersome, but contain treasure as well as trash and are generally overlooked. A Tampa man arrived at Wabasso late one time, after the storm, after the thousands with metal detectors, but he saw they had ignored the high tide line so he began a favorite technique of his called "Kicking Trash". That meant kicking the seaweed out of the way and detecting beneath it. Frankie G. then proceeded to find a Spanish emerald and gold pendant that was initially valued at 40 thou. True Story, well known among Tampa treasure hunters.
Low tide lines can be even better, especially if you can wade out a little with your detector. That first step out in the water, that little drop off at every active beach just after you step in, its an underwater cut, and though it moves with the tides, it acts just like a cut on the dry beach, and things get deposited all along it regularly. It also digs as it works, 24-7, non-stop, a supremely powerful machine.
A lady attorney in St. Petersburg Florida called a friend of mine who was a Whites metal detector dealer in Tampa and said there was a reward of $1000 cash for her lost ring, it was a big diamond heirloom, she had lost it in the water at a beach down the street from her house, was he interested? He said yeah, and called me. We took my old Chevy Impala across the bridge loaded down with gear for a treasure hunt. The plan was that Gary would dive out by the marker the lady had left (A smart thing), and I would wade, working the drop-off at the waters edge. I had a big scoop I made and a Whites Surfmaster and a shorty wetsuit -- Gary was in full scuba gear. The two largest problems to success in this were going to be the weather, it was blustery, cold, and the surf was up, as it had been since the loss, and there was also the fact that we were the third party to search for the ring, other divers had been out, and it was not doubtful that some divers would pocket the $10,000.00 ring in preference to the $1000.00 reward.
I worked that first drop-off cut right off the beach, and it was messy and difficult. I had dug my six or seventh flip top when Gary came in with a spent tank and a load of depression. He'd tied off to the cement block the lady had left where she thought she lost the ring, and gone out in spirals around that point, but to no avail. Gary started shedding the tank and getting his other tank ready. I got another signal, sounded like a really nice flip top. I dug and dug and swallowed sea water and sand, and finally was able to discern that the target was now in my scoop and not in the hole I had dug. I left the water to take a break too, and had the scoop and detector with me. My weight belt was real heavy there on land, let me tell you.
Gary was just donning his second tank when I dumped what was in my scoop, and there, right on top, was the ring. There was bedlam, people were hollering and the lady attorney came running down the street with tears in her eyes. People on the beach were shaking my hand and Gary and I were both really glad we didn't have to go into the mushy surf again for another round. We followed the lady to the bank and she counted out 10 one hundred dollar bills, 5 for each of us. Of all the things I did while I was a member of the Tampa Archaeological club, that thing right there made me more famous locally than anything else.
***********************
Finding gold chains with metal detectors, or any chains for that matter, is an exercise in futility. There is usually not enough surface area presented to the coils field for a metal detector to induce proper eddy currents in the metal to analyze. In English: the links are usually too small to create a signal. This does not mean that chains cannot be found, but truth be told there are many many chains lost that will never be recovered because they have already been ground to dust, or are well on their way to it. The only chains I have ever found with a detector were attached to medallions and it was the medal I detected not the chain. I have heard of others finding what are called "Chain Balls" with their metal detectors, and those are weird formations where the ocean has sorted chains together by virtue of their weight and makeup, again, through Aggregation, and then the things got all tangled together, forming a glob big enough to metal detect. I myself have seen small chain balls formed from a single chain, its generally how an ocean will treat a chain on its way to obliteration, a natural occurence.
I did find one loose chain one day, and it was a killer. If I had known what I know now, about aggregation, I would have raked that sandbar face as deeply as possible with a plain iron rake head, because there were probably more there.
It was after Andrew, just north of Dania pier where the old pier and swimming beach used to be. Big deep holes, lots of rock bottom, and sandbars moving radically with every tide. I found so many sets of keys, and so many lead sinkers, I was literally scrapping brass and lead. On one such sandbar face I got a good signal, it turned out to be an aluminum can, but on the way to digging it up I became ensnared in the longest 18k gold chain I have ever found. Happy Day. The signal was of course still in the hole and I dug it hoping for a Mr. T medallion but it was, afterall, just another aluminum can.
On another day, on another sandbar face, I got a deeper signal so large it had to another can. Because I follow my own rules I was bound and determined to get that can out of there and dispose of it properly. I'm serious, but also because large trash can mask smaller items below, and it was a good spot. Always remove trash for your own good too.
I dug and dug and dug. Underwater is like in space, when you push something you move backwards more than moving the thing you push. This makes digging by hand a really grueling chore full of reflux, angst, and general discomfort. You can hand fan down to a certain point but then, not. Its a hand scoop at a time, and it wears. I kept digging deeper into the loose sand and the target kept getting louder. Finally I checked the hole with the detector again, and the target was no longer in the hole. I myself was in the hole a good ways, and I looked backward under my arm at the pile of sand I had dug, expecting to see an aluminum can. But no, this time it was an 18K arm bangle with Hebrew karat markings! Not your usual piece of bottom cobble.
So you never know what you will find.
Chains are good to look for when searching with your eyes on an eroded swimming beach. Sometimes on sunny days, in the long shallow waves that sweep up the beach for a long way, chains can be spotted in the flow, but you must be quick. I have heard of chains being found in some places like Miami beach after storms, all tangled up in seaweed at the high tide line. That I got from a lifeguard who I befriended during my time with Mother Ocean, and that guy was really cool. I had come onto his beach before sunrise, and was in the water checking out new places before the lifeguards even came on duty. On that Miami beach it was a lot different than Dania or Hallandale where I usually dove, though pickings were getting slim at my regular spots so I was ranging out. There were large troughs dug into the sand by the tides at this beach, all in lines outward to the sea, looking like sand dunes more than anything. I didn't find anything at that beach, although I could see there were a lot of holes that had been dug over time by other hunters. After I finished diving the lifeguard met me as I came out of the water, and he was curious.
"Did you find anything"? he asked.
I shook my head in the negative while getting untangled from my gear.
"NOTHING?"
Like I was a slacker schlep or something.
"I saw a lot of holes dug by people who probably did find things," I replied in consternation.
He smiled, explaining those were his holes, he had done well on this beach in his off duty hours, using a Brownies rig and a high power PI detector. He said the PI was the only mistake he made. He had some money so he decided that he would buy the best most powerfullest metal detector he could find. He researched and researched and finally spent 3 thousand on a brand I had never heard of. He said it picked up tire rims at 6 feet! I was like dude thats not a detector thats a magnetometer! Yes, he said, it was not as good as he would have liked with small targets. Once again I silently thanked Wallace Chandler for writing "Advanced Shallow Water Treasure Hunting". I did mention then to the lifeguard that it was a book worthy of perusal. It so happened that this Brownies 3rd Lung diver lifeguard treasure hunter guy had a buyer coming to look at his scrap gold that morning, and he showed me some. He reached below the seat of an unlocked and kind of shabby VW bug in the parking lot, and pulled out a styrofoam cup chock full of the most gaudy and expensive jewelry I ever saw in my life, crosses, stars of David, diamonds.
"So I guess movie stars swim at this beach sometimes, eh?" I asked.
"Used to, this is all old stuff uncovered by Andrew, your friend and mine. Seen any of the insurance guys yet?"
I said "No, whats that?"
"They see us out here finding stuff, they know the goldc buyers in Miami, and they have all these paid claims on lost jewelry, so they are sending out their divers to try to recoup some of their lost money. Be careful around those guys."
I nodded and we talked some more before I left.
Other than the insurance diver I eventually did meet, and that lifeguard, I met no other divers who were doing what we were doing at that time. I told one older diver about it, and suggested he work Haulover. He was smart. He did it. He was a happy diver ever after.
***********************
My mind is full of things I wish I had known back then. Its just the process of learning but sometimes it seems backwards. I try to convey information I could have used, and is still useful albeit under new conditions. There really is value here, otherwise you might as well read the funny papers.
The mistake our lifeguard made above, of possessing capital resources and therefore over-buying equipment is a common thread among us. We all have tales to tell, and its a fact that the equipment manufacturers make off with a large amount of the gold we find, when its all said and done.
Now I am not knocking the equipment people, I have been one myself on occasion, but things I have learned largely amount to this: getting the job done well, and safely, for the least amount of expenditure. And as we all know too, there will always be unexpected expenditures to eat up any profits, so why over-spend on equipment when things you can make work better and last longer? Wait until you absolutely have to have something before getting it. Age has made me realize that its usually better to think things out for a while before doing them, there are almost always better ways. Invent.
I think, like so much else, that over-buying is psychological, its a bar in the CAGE, we are trying to take the easiest way to stack the odds in our favor, the path of least resistance, of least effort. Usually that goes awry quickly, and things going bad tend to pick up an evil kind of momentum, erupting in spectacles of violent inefficiency truly awesome to see, and scary, though like slapstick comedy too. Its very difficult to know whether to laugh or cry sometimes, and its our ability to endure embarassment that defines us here on planet Earth, our toughness against the adversity we create for ourselves.
The best piece of equipment I ever learned to use is a screen, 3/8" is good, woven mining screen is best, and you can easily build a box for it out of four 24" two by fours, which you can then float with four empty 2-litre soda bottles that are laying around everywhere. And there you are on the high ground again, recycling is being an environmental asset, thats a win-win. Everything from mud bottom to sand can easily be scooped into your floating sifter with a regular shovel, although rice shovels or other strengthened diggers can be used and may last longer. I personally like a nice piece of heavy pipe welded to a heavy duty shovel head stiffened with heavy plate, but I am a monster. Always use a float on the handle or you will lose it. A piece of foam pipe insulation slid onto the handle works well.
I could get started today and busily finding silver and gold in the water for the cost of a floating screen, a couple decent shovels, and a weight belt. There are so many old piers in the water that can't be seen unless you walk right up on the nubs of the pilings at low tide, you could never screen around one percent of them in your life! And rotted pilings mean OLD pilings. Wherever boats were loaded and unloaded there is real treasure lost in the water there. You can go much deeper in the water with a shovel than a metal detector, usually.
Half of the items I found at Dania and Hallandale after Andrew could have been obtained in this way, with screens, and I could have gotten to the core of the situation much more quickly had I understood this. I could have pulled framed chainlink fence supporting 1/2" screen across the sand bars and low areas with a small motor boat and found a lot more. Its OK though, I use the heck out of what I know now, when I can, and it is more valuable all the time. I share too.
The thing that the vast majority can't seem to realize is that anywhere people have congregated over time there are what I call "Casually Lost Hoards". Sometimes, at old fair grounds or beach parks on lakes and oceans, the amount deposited in the casually lost hoard is truly gargantuan, unbelievable. If it was all gathered together, all the silver and gold lost, say, on Fort Lauderdale beach from the time people started partying there in the late 1800s, it would amount to a pile of treasure so large as to be unimaginable, it would make pirate treasure seem positively dinky. I can honestly say that my observations of this phenomenon are some of the most interesting observations of my life. My studies of archaeology only fortify that attitude. Places like European Roman Military camps, and even 1800s military camps I've located and detected in Florida, announce to any and all that huge amounts of very valuable items are lost anywhere people group together for any length of time, and because grouping together is what people do a lot, well you can see the answer already can't you?
fin
Photo explanations:
1. GPAA booth at Alexander City Alabama, c.2003.
2. A collage of some silver and gold jewelry found after hurricane Andrew on South Florida Beaches. From before the days of digital photos!
3. A regular 1920s Florida Beach Scene.
4. Author Bill Gallagher
5. The new and improved Dania Pier, Dania Beach, Florida.
Bibliography:
Beachcombers Handbook. Warren Merkitch, Karl von Mueller.
On Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau (Mentions the phenomenon of water aggregation in passing)
Advanced Shallow Water Treasure Hunting, Wallace Chandler
Diamonds In The Surf, Whites Electronics
treasurehuntingwithbillgallagher.blogspot.com
Author Bio:
Bill Gallagher has sold over 40 articles to Western and Eastern Treasures magazine, 1979-1995, and over 125 articles were sold to Lost Treasure magazine, 2013-2018. Other publications include but are not limited to World Of Treasures, Treasure Cache (Annual) and Lapidary Journal. Bill Gallagher lives near Akela New Mexico now and has a small mining camp and farm where he renders ore as a craft, and grows tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.
No comments:
Post a Comment