we are gathered here today, in slight advance of Memorial Day to wish our LordMarcovan blessed fortune in his trip to the land of often-buried treasure.

Would that his extended family of woodelves and barrel makers had been able to construct a sturdy enough sailing ship for such a trip but alas…such was not to be.

We are, therefor, obligated to pay homage to the windsprites for such a voyage, a greedy, rapacious clan who historically show  no price forgiveness.

A generous forum member has donated a 1964 Worlds Fair medal in .900 Gold, 1/4 oz, 28mm. Please support this eBay auction which starts well under the current price of gold.http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230479674300&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

In order to defray LordM’s costs, please contribute “in memorium” or any other “um”  to this effort. We are so close… and yet so far. If the path to the [close to the] Emerald Isle be better served in ’11 instead of ’10, so be it. otherwise, we were all thinking of ’10.  

And the Metal Detecting Gods shall let us know [ in good and honest time] their intentions.

5.03.10 Update-welcome to our newest contributor: carto.illuminati 1 Share $15

… Jkustelski!

Congratulations! 

And again, many thanks to all of you for your support.  I feel a bit guilty for not having posted any dig stories here recently, or much of anything.  We’re coming into the hotter, more humid, and less comfortable time of year where I live, but that’s not a very good excuse- it’s still been nice enough to go diggin’!  (Actually, I did go, once, but the finds were so lackluster that it really wasn’t worth writing about.)

As ever, I find myself humbled by your generosity.  Thanks again.

LordM will be conducting a drawing this Friday night ( BMC/NEN giveaway) for all current contributors. Best of luck to all participants!

We are approaching something of a mid-point in our fund raising efforts. Unfortunately my posts to this site have slowed down of late and I offer my apologies. Health problems with my leg have me on a number of medications which leave me mentally fuzzy and without too much ambition. Regardless, I will pick up my posting efforts as its important to me to keep this site timely and relevant. We had a nice eBay sale recently on two British half pennies which brought in $100+. I’m still asking for further donations of duplicate or unwanted coins which we can sell on eBay. Keep up the good work and invite others to contribute!

Thanks to an anonymous donor for a couple of very nice mid-19th Century British half pennies, a .900 gold token/medal from the 1964 NY worlds fair and some European minors.

We are in that strange period between the first blush of spring and the real thing. It’s still getting cold enough for frost at night but the grass needs mowing. It’s like that with this project as well-we haven’t raised all the money and it’s coming in about as fast as growing grass but we’ll get there. So…not too much I can say except thanks to our contributors and hopefully we’ll continue to add them at a steady pace.

Remember, if cash is tight, we’ll take donations of your unwanted and duplicate coins for sale on eBay.

1916F Mark Germany PCGS MS63 sold for $77-nice!

3 NGC 1950′s graded proof shillings which I need to image, along with a Prussian Drei Mark which is already sold. I’ll link the 1S’s shortly.

A Canadian dollar, a Churchill crown (I’m saving for Ajaan) and some modern minors which I’ll link later as well.

Thanks To Our Newest paid Contributor Ankurj 2 Shares $30!

DIGS O’ THE DAY (2010-03-29): IVANHOE PLANTATION & OWENS FERRY RECON  by R. Shinnick

Today’s outing was a reconnaissance mission, so don’t expect to see much in the way of detector finds. I typically do more driving than detecting on my recon missions. I thought I’d bring y’all along for the ride on this one, though, just for fun.

I might not be able to produce good finds on every outing, but I can always take pictures. Unfortunately my camera is no longer field-worthy, so I usually borrow my wife’s. It was in her car today, though, and she was off at work, so I was forced to bring along the less-than-ideal camera that belongs to my eight year old daughter. The morning and early afternoon were photogenic enough-it was another glorious spring day.

Peter Bufkin, a personal friend who happens to be my boss now, is a member of a hunting club in Camden County, Georgia, just south of where we live. This club, called Ivanhoe Plantation, is situated on the Satilla River. Peter had mentioned it being the site of an old rice plantation. High ground along a river is always prime real estate for relic hunting, because the rivers were the main travel arteries here, back in the days before railroads and modern highways. The high river bluffs were where people usually built their houses. Long before white settlers, the Indians did the same, so shell middens and burial mounds are not uncommon in such places, either. This area definitely sounded interesting. Peter had spoken of it several years ago and told me he’d get me permission to come out. Just last week he came to me and told me they’d cut some woods down and were clearing part of the land. This is always a good time to search, when the land is plowed up. If you’ve read any of my other stories, you know how much I love “naked dirt”. Peter said he’d gotten permission for me to go, so off I went today.

My first stop was in the town of Woodbine, at the Bryan Lang Historical Library. I did a little bit of quick reading (just skimming, really) on Owens Ferry, to supplement what little I’d picked up from online sources the day before. The library didn’t have any old maps like I’d hoped, but I read some interesting tidbits.

The famous naturalist William Bartram passed through here in the 1770s. From what little I’ve gathered, the first white settler of the tract was named Brown, and he was a Revolutionary War patriot. The place was called Brown’s Ferry prior to 1860, when it was renamed Owens Ferry. Lumber was the major cash crop in the latter part of the 19th century, and remains a big business in this area today, so plenty of old steamboats used to navigate the river in bygone days, chugging back and forth carrying logs and supplies.

Below: The steamer C.H. Evans at Owens Ferry, around the turn of the last century. She began service around 1903 and made three weekly trips from Brunswick, with stops at Jekyll Island and all along the Satilla River up to Burnt Fort.

(Photo from a newspaper clipping, courtesy of the Bryan Lang Historical Library.)

In time, the lumbering took its toll on the woodlands here, the sawmills closed, and as modern roads and railroads developed, the river traffic decreased and eventually all but disappeared. By about 1930, the steamboats were gone. Owens Ferry, at one time a small village or hamlet with a population of around 250 souls, withered away to nothing. Today the site has been reclaimed by forest and I can’t help but wonder how much it resembles what William Bartram would have seen some 240 years ago.

Bartram might have approved of my musical choice. Today’s driving soundtrack was Baroque, including selections such as The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba by George Frederic Handel and some of the usual Bach concertos. Later it Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez- I love classical Spanish guitar and wish I could play it, but sadly, I can’t carry a note in a bucket. In my listening, I can rock out with the best of ‘em, but lately I’ve been on a Classical kick.

I passed a sign for Maryfield Plantation, which said it had been established in 1808. As I rolled down a muddy road that would have looked familiar to a British redcoat, plantation slave, or Confederate soldier, I could feel time begin to slow down and seemingly move backwards. I do love some of these remote places where the aura of the past lives on. I found the Ivanhoe Plantation sign and drove through the gate. When I stopped the car, the soundtrack changed to nothing but breeze, birdsong, and the rhythmic, knocking whirr of a red-headed woodpecker at work high up in a pine tree. Then there was the clamorous barking of dogs as I came upon an old white frame house with a green tin roof.

A man in a red shirt came out. I introduced myself and told him what I was doing, and how Peter Bufkin had gotten me permission to poke around out here. The man’s name was John MacDowell (or maybe he said McDonald?), but he told me everybody called him Johnny Mac. He was the caretaker of Ivanhoe plantation. He seemed friendly enough, and told me the dogs wouldn’t bite.

“Your pond’s barely big enough for your boat,” I said, gesturing towards the tiny pond to the left of the house. An aluminum johnboat was pulled up on the bank on one side of it.

“Yeah, the boat’s mostly just for show,” he chuckled.

“Got anything stocked in there?”

“Yep, there’s bass and bream in there.”

The house had character. All sorts of old relics like giant saw blades and old iron tools hung on the exterior walls. Johnny Mac explained to me that he’d found many of these items himself. I asked if he had a metal detector, and he said he did, but apparently most of the finds had been made while they dug in the garden or wandered around the place.

“I love the old house. When was it built?” I asked him, and speculated on the date. “Looks to me like sometime around 1900.” I complimented him on its charm.

“It’s just an old shotgun shack.” He shrugged. “You’re close. It will be a hundred years old this year.”

“Ah, so 1910, then.”

I think he said it had been in his family for generations, and had belonged to a great-great-great-grandfather (“three greats”).

I asked where the new clearcut was and he pointed up the road. He warned me that turkey hunters might be up there, and that I’d better have boots on, because it was muddy in patches. I had figured that much out from my drive in. I had on suede leather moccasins which were OK for sand, but definitely not mudworthy.

We discussed an old slave cemetery that was nearby. He said there were only about eight markers left, all of them illegible from the ravages of time, but someone had surveyed more than 160 graves there. The sunken graves were supposedly visible only because the soil had collapsed into them, leaving depressions in the ground.

Old cemeteries fascinate me, but I decided to check out the ferry site first. Money was carried and spent at ferry crossings, and coinshooters like me try to sniff out the spots where nice old coins are likely to be found. Johnny Mac pointed across his front lawn to a nearly invisible trail through the grass, which ran right past his garden and into the woods. I was surprised when he said I could actually drive back in there. He told me to drive to the fork in the trail, and then walk down the left fork to the river bluff. At certain times, the remains of the old dock would be visible.

I followed the trail as instructed, and soon could see the river through the trees. This was a high bluff indeed, perhaps thirty or forty feet above the river. The trail followed the contours of the bluff as it wound down to what must have been the old landing. At first I thought I saw the pilings of the old dock sticking up from the mud, but these were in fact the “knees” of cypress trees- a common swampland sight. The river flowed by at a reasonable pace, whirling and eddying around deadfall trees and cypress trunks. Somewhere on the other side was the very old town of Jeffersonton, which was described as having all but vanished by 1883, according to an article I’d read at the library. That intrigued me, and bears further research. There were thickets of vines and overgrowth everywhere along the bluff, which would make rough going, but the trail itself was wide and clear in this spot, scattered with little more than an accumulation of live oak leaves. It was detectable.

I returned to the car and got out my detector and gear, then began searching along the trail. Just as the detector beeped its first signal, there was another electronic chiming from my front pocket. I had forgotten about my cellphone. Unlike most modern Americans, I am not particularly enamored of my cellphone, and seldom keep it turned on, but I learned long ago that it is nice to have one for emergencies when out in the field or on the road.

It was my mother, calling from Florida. We had a brief but pleasant conversation. I reflected for a moment on how surreal it was to be out in the middle of nowhere, crashing through a thicket on the site of a long-vanished village while talking to someone who was hundreds of miles away. For a brief moment I was pulled out of the 19th century and back into the 21st. I can only imagine what the folks who once rode their horses down to this old ferry crossing would have thought of my cell phone and metal detector. Surely such technology would have seemed like sorcery to them. It does to me, too, sometimes.

I dug the target and removed the dirt from it with a small nylon brush. it proved to be a knoblike brass doodad. From the greenish patina on it, it was clear that it had been in the ground a century or more. Sure, it was just a doodad or a whatzit, but an encouraging clue that I was on the right track towards some older finds.

The next target was also a brass doodad and also greenish with age. This was clearly some kind of small pipe fitting. It too might have been a hundred years old, but not too much older than that, because it was threaded on one end.

The third signal was difficult to pinpoint and rather deep. It was a well-rusted nail, but it looked like it might have been one of the old square headed kind.

By this time the sand gnats had gathered in clouds and were harassing me mercilessly. These were actually a little bigger than the average gnat, though not as big as mosquitoes. My wife calls ‘em “shad gnats”. They weren’t biting much, probably due to my liberal coating of insect repellent, but they were crawling all over the back of my neck and in my hair. Georgia gnats love human scalps. To judge by the constant buzzing and squirming sensations, there were also dozens of them crawling in and out of my ears. It is virtually impossible to focus on any rational thought whatsoever when your ear canals have been invaded by insects! I gave up searching and headed for the car, hoping I’d find my head net. It is similar to what a beekeeper wears, but smaller and lighter, being made entirely of a fine mesh material. It probably looks goofy, but who cares, when one is alone in the woods and being offered up as a sacrifice to the gnat gods? (Somewhere I saw that there’s a book called “Chew Toy of the Gnat Gods”. Haven’t read it yet, but I laughed out loud when I saw the title- love it!)

When I got to the car I was so gnat-chewed and frazzled that I decided to pack it all in rather than find my head net. Though I hadn’t been walking much at all, I felt fatigued and all itchy and crawly. There’s the downside of springtime here- the insects don’t take very long to come out. They’ll be followed shortly by the humidity, and then the uncomfortable season will be in full swing. I wish I’d found this place in wintertime. But it is intriguing enough that I’ll probably be back, gnats and humidity notwithstanding.

I drove back out and stopped at the house to thank Johnny Mac for the hospitality. We briefly discussed the local history some more. He told me his wife was the historian and knew more than he did. She must have a pretty respectable knowledge, then, because he told me all sorts of things- more than I could absorb in one sitting.

Suddenly he stopped talking and looked over his shoulder.

“Huh, there they are!” he exclaimed. “Funny, they were just out here lookin’ for those this morning, and now here they are.”

Since I was obviously in the dark about who or what “they” and “them” were, he explained, pointing skywards.

“Look! Swallow-tailed kites!”

For the nanosecond it took my mind to process this, I mentally pictured Ben Franklin’s kite, with a key hanging from the string. Then I realized he was talking about a bird. I knew there were hawk-like birds called kites- they’re raptors. Sure enough, there was a large black bird in the sky, soaring past the top of a tall pine tree. It was all black with a white underside, and its tail was very distinctly forked, like that of a swallow. In fact, it looked like a huge swallow on steroids. I was mesmerized, never having seen such a bird before. Sadly, it was far too fast to capture with my daughter’s balky old camera. I guess some naturalists or birdwatchers must have been looking for the kites- surely “they” couldn’t have meant hunters. In the short glimpse I got, I could see it was an impressive and beautiful bird.

I took my leave of Johnny Mac, thanking him again and taking his card so I could call him in advance before my next visit. I forgot to investigate the old slave cemetery and drove down the muddy road to find the clearcut Peter had mentioned.

It was still rough, not having been root-raked or plowed. A bit too rough for my taste, I confess, since I am a somewhat lazy relic hunter. I probably should have gotten out and walked it to look for telltale clues like old glass or pottery sherds. I was weary and wary from battling the gnats, though, so I was not feeling intrepid enough to walk the site today. I wonder how close to the river it is. It certainly bears further investigation. Who knows when they’ll plow it up? If they do that, I’ll be all over it.

On my drive back out, I noticed what looked like a black tree root sticking up from the sand roadbed.

As I drove past it, I realized it was not a root at all, but a snake! That makes TWO snake encounters in the last two outings! I’d passed so close to this one, I thought I might have run it over. Carefully backing the car up, I went to investigate. It lay with its body in a straight line, but scrunched up somehow, as if it were dead or in distress.

It was black and grey- not much longer than the little black snake I’d met on my last outing, but much thicker and more muscular in appearance. Its triangular head and menacing appearance told me that unlike the previous snake, this one was probably poisonous. I got out of the car and gingerly touched the tip of its tail with the toe of my moccasin. It came to life rather suddenly, slithered a foot or two, and then adopted the classic threat posture, switching its tail to and fro.

Whoah! I stepped back quickly. It was a small rattlesnake!

Its rattles were so small that I hadn’t noticed them when I gently toed it, nor could I hear them rattling, but it was plain to see that the snake obviously trying to rattle them vigorously. As I’ve said previously, I’m not terrified of snakes as long as I can see ‘em from a safe distance and I don’t have to touch ‘em, but I’ve heard that in some poisonous species the young ones are even more venomous than the adults. I don’t know if that applies to rattlers, but I wasn’t about to stick around and find out. I got back in the car and shot my pictures from the window. Unfortunately the camera I was stuck with today lacked a zoom lens.

If I’d been so inclined, I probably could have killed the rattlesnake by running it over with the car. (I’d almost done that accidentally, and probably did run over its tail, which might be why it had a silent rattle, but then again it might not have grown its rattles yet.) Killing critters is not my style, though. That’s why I’m a relic hunter instead of a deer hunter. I’m a soft-hearted, “llive-and-let-live” kind of guy, except when it comes to sand gnats or other biting insects. This was his territory, not mine. I left him alone and drove on. There was a car in my rearview mirror, coming in my direction from a long way back. Ironically, I might have saved that rattler’s life by nearly squashing him and then prodding him to move out of the middle of the road.

 Back on the paved road on the way home, I looked back and saw swallow-tailed kites circling in the sky again. I pulled off the road and aimed the camera over the roof of the car, patiently waiting in vain catch a shot of them. It just didn’t happen, so I’ll have to rely on a stock photo to show you what they looked like.

(Photo below by nature photographer Joe Nicholson of bugwood.org, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Well, it isn’t my painted bunting, but a swallow-tailed kite will do nicely. I might not have added any old coins to my “dug keepers” album, but I penciled another little checkmark into my bird book. (I also encountered my first poisonous snake while out exploring, but that’s a milestone I’d rather not repeat.) I also got in some good recon on several potential detecting sites.

Thanks for comin’ along for the ride. Hope you’ll follow me around next time, too. Who knows- maybe we’ll turn up something interesting.

~RWS

DIGS O’ THE DAY (2010-03-14): BACK TO BLACK BANKS

In the spring of 1999, I had the opportunity to search the yard of the Hartridge residence, which I’m told is the oldest inhabited house on St. Simons Island.  The Hartridge’s daughter, Trina, was a classmate of mine in high school and is currently a sales manager where I work.  I don’t remember how the subject came up originally, but when Trina mentioned her parents owned land in the Black Banks area of the island, my interest was piqued, as Black Banks was the site of an antebellum plantation.  Through Trina’s introduction, I was permitted to hunt the yard of her parents’ home, which was built in 1876, a short distance away from where the original plantation house once stood.  It is, to my knowledge, the only Victorian house still standing on the island, though Old Town Brunswick on the mainland has dozens if not hundreds of them.

Though I dug no 19th century coins, the hunting there was very productive, and several silver coins turned up.  There were two Barber dimes dated 1914 and 1916.  The 1916 was in exceptional condition- almost Mint State, with much of the original luster remaining- and is probably the best Barber dime I’ve found so far.  It was probably lost not too long after it was made.  (For my non-numismatic readers, I should explain that the “Barber” coins of 1892-1916 get their name from William Barber, the Mint engraver who designed them.  Many probably did get spent on haircuts, too, though.)

There were also two “Mercury” or Winged Liberty dimes.  The first was only about two-thirds of a coin.  It had been melted in a fire and was thin, brittle, and stretched out much larger than a normal dime.  The first portion of the date appeared to read “191”, so it would have been struck in 1916 or 1917.  It was cracked when I found it, and now, after eleven years in my dug coin album, it has disintegrated into small crumbs of metal.  I never found the rest of it.  The other Mercury dime was dated 1926.

Another silver coin found was a British shilling from 1941.  It bore the portrait of King George VI on the obverse.  This type of shilling was made with two different reverse designs: “English” and “Scottish”, and mine had the Scottish lion on it.

There is also a sixth silver coin from around that time in my dug finds book- it is a 1946 Roosevelt dime- but I don’t know if it came up at the Hartridge house or on a subsequent site, since my recordkeeping lapsed for a while.

In summary, this site was very good to me in the past, and I knew I’d been the first to detect there.  I also knew I’d barely scratched the surface, and plenty of goodies were sure to remain.  Needless to say, I was excited when I was recently granted permission to return.

On Sunday, March 14, 2010, I crossed the Torras Causeway to the island.  It was a partly cloudy and rather cool day, and the Bach cantatas playing on my car radio suited the mood nicely.  Since metal detecting is a journey into the past, I often listen to classical music to put me in a historical frame of mind.

As I approached the Hartridge house, it didn’t look very different from how it had eleven years before.  The entire neighborhood had become a gated community, but little else appeared to have changed.

Mrs. Hartidge greeted me at the gate and offered to show me where the property boundaries lay.  It turned out there was a very great deal more property than just the yard around the house.  In fact, the whole tract was something like eleven acres.  Eleven acres on Saint Simons Island… wow.  There aren’t many folks who have tracts of land that size on the island, unless the property has descended through several generations of an old family, which this one no doubt has.

A lot of this acreage is still partially wooded and Mrs. Hartridge said she didn’t believe it had ever been touched by a metal detector.  Though I had hunted the yard before, it remained my primary focus for today, since old coins are my chosen quarry, and they tend to be closer to the house in yards like this.  Since Mrs. Hartridge graciously extended permission for me to come back anytime I liked, the other parts of the property would definitely bear further investigation later on.

My first target in the yard registered as a good coin signal on the detector’s meter.  It proved to be a fragment of an old Mason jar lid, however.  The next signal was difficult to pinpoint at first, but it ended up being a buried electrical cable. Fortunately I hadn’t damaged the tough rubber insulation around it.  I made a mental note to myself to dig carefully around here, since electrocuting myself or knocking out my hosts’ power didn’t seem like much fun.

In the northwestern corner of the yard, near where a part of the marsh wrapped around the property, there was a lichen-encrusted cedar tree.  Beneath it there was a patch of brilliant green grass.  It was of a different type than the rest of the lawn, and looked like the stuff used to line kids’ Easter baskets- maybe even brighter than that.  It was almost a fluorescent green.  I don’t know why a little patch of bright green grass brightened my spirits, but it did.  Maybe it’s the symbolism behind that whole “looking for greener pastures” thing.

In another sign of spring, the azaleas were beginning to bloom, and the sound of birdsong was in the air.  There were several handsome sago palms in the yard.  Near one of them, I dug a small brass doodad, which had probably been a part of a zipper.  Near another sago palm was a buried pipe, then another electrical line.  I was having more luck in finding buried utilities than coins!  Usually I can tell from the sound of the signal when something is long and linear like a pipeline or cable, but I just wasn’t hearing it in the signals today.

Circling around behind one of the sago palms, I noticed yet ANOTHER electrical line, this time fully exposed and on top of the ground.

Then it moved.

WHOA!  WAIT A SECOND! THAT’S NOT AN ELECTRICAL CABLE!

It’s a SNAKE!!!

For me, encountering a live snake in the outdoors is usually followed by a brief adrenaline rush- I guess that’s normal.  I’m not terrified of them, but I do prefer to keep my distance.

This little guy was no threat, however.  He was just a harmless little black snake, maybe ten inches to a foot long, and no bigger around than my middle finger.  He seemed remarkably casual about my presence, too.  I was able to hold the camera within only about four inches or so of his face, and he never budged, except for the forked tongue flickering.

I prodded him gently with the detector searchcoil, but he still didn’t move.  I could have picked him up, had I been so inclined, but I wasn’t.  I might not be terrified of snakes, but that doesn’t mean I want to pet them, either.

This was my third serpentine encounter while out detecting.  The first had happened in North Carolina, and was also a black snake, but a much, much larger one- maybe four or five feet long.  He too was harmless, but impressive for his size.  The second had been just a small green snake, no bigger than today’s encounter, but that one fell from a tree branch across the bill of my cap, and swung back and forth in front of my face for a moment.  I’ll admit I jumped back pretty quickly that time!

My next target was a large iron object- something I usually classify as a “rusty-crusty”.  Most of the targets I classify as rusty-crusties are unidentifiable, but this was a ring-shaped fitting of some sort.  I’m not really sure what it had been used for, but it was obviously very old and had been in the ground a long time.

When I had recovered the rusty-crusty ring thing, I’d pinpointed it with the detachable electronic probe that is mounted on my detector’s shaft.  The probe has a toggle switch that allows me to switch between it and the main searchcoil.  I unknowingly left the switch in the “probe” position rather than switching it back to “coil” when I resumed hunting, which meant for the next ten minutes or so I walked half the circumference of the yard without getting a single signal at all.  (This was sort of the equivalent of taking a bunch of pictures with the lens cap of the camera on.)

Finally I realized my mistake and switched the coil back on.  I got a shallow coin-range target near the driveway and it proved to be a 1978 Lincoln cent.  Then I moved over into the east yard, which had produced most of the silver coins on my last visit.

The next signal was in the middle range of the detector’s meter, meaning it could have been just about anything, but it was clear and repeatable, and had a good depth to it, so I dug.  It turned out to be a musketball, which might have been older than the nearby house.  It was a “spent” musketball, meaning it had been fired and had traveled its full range before hitting the ground.  I could tell this because it was only slightly distorted on one side.  I’d say there’s a good chance this was a relic of the old Black Banks plantation rather than the 1876 Gould-Hartridge house whose yard I found it in.  Consider that round musketballs and the smoothbore weapons that fired them were militarily obsolete by around the 1850s and were supplanted by the conical “Minie” style bullets used during the Civil war in rifled guns.  Sportsmen continued to use the round balls throughout the rest of the 19th century and even to the present day, but this ball had been in the ground a very long time and had the patina old lead gets after a century and a half in the dirt.  At least I’d made one good find for the day, even if the old coins (and in fact just about ANY coins) were eluding me.

After finding the musketball, I slowed down and worked that area of the yard much more carefully, but encountered nothing but more buried pipelines.  Apparently the water pipes in this yard are the older metal kind, instead of modern PVC plastic.

I had to step back abruptly for my second wildlife encounter of the day.  It was another harmless critter, but he was doing his best to appear threatening.  I’d come upon a fiddler crab in the grass.  The males of this species have one giant, oversized claw that they use for fighting and attracting females.  When they’re waving those mismatched claws around, they look like a fiddler playing his instrument, hence the name.  Fiddlers live by the millions in our Marshes of Glynn, and are quite capable of ranging inland a good distance.  This guy had no doubt come up out of the marsh behind the house.  He was several hundred yards away from the water and mud where one would normally expect to find crabs.  He tired of the threat display and chose to use his big claw as a shield, instead.  I left him alone and went on my way, resolving to watch my step so I wouldn’t accidentally squish him on my next pass.

After another twenty minutes or so I was feeling the exhaustion and strain in my back and right arm.  The new kneepads my wife got me helped my knees considerably, but I’m still so out of shape and rusty that I’ll need to do much more detecting in the near future to get back into the swing of things.

Today’s hunt was a bit of a letdown, really, especially on the coin front, with only the one shallow modern Lincoln cent dug.  The musketball was a keeper, though, and I love the site- it’s beautiful.  I got some critter pictures, too, so I am not calling the day a failure.  Besides, this site deserves further exploration.  When it comes to the yard around the house, I guess I was pretty thorough back in ’99, and got all of the “easier” finds, but I am sure there are still some deeper, smaller, and/or more challenging ones there.  Maybe next time I won’t focus so much on the area around the house and will move outside the fence to search some of the other acreage.

I give thanks to my hosts, and to all of y’all readers, of course.

Stay tuned for the next time I get my hands dirty!

~RWS

INDEX OF DIG STORIES

Congratulations, or should I say coingratulations?

Here is a link back to the giveaway description.

(I know, I should have done the drawing a long time ago.)

Let me (Laurentyvan) sneak in here at the bottom to thank some new contributors today: rocketman 1 Share $15, G. Menendez (need forum name) 2 Shares $30, and duki who upgraded from 1 share to 2.  Thanks folks!

I’m going to combine the $50 credit from Black Mountain Coins and the Donated coin from NEN into one giveaway for all contributors, drawing end of April.

I won’t even ask anyone to post to the thread, I’ll just use it to update the current  # of contributors for the world coin forum.

The eBay auction for the American Silver Eagle will begin tonight, I’ll post a link after it starts. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230453960443&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

The latest contribution came in the post today from Dentuck for 1 Share-$15. I had to laugh when I turned the envelope over- a classic bit of numismatic creativity. Thanks Dentuck for “doing your part to help send LordM to England”.

 Keep them coming in folks-we’re slowing down quite a bit.

Kuhli won the latest giveaway-the wearing of the yellow smiley. If you hear from him, have him give me a buzz- I need his address and he hasn’t returned my PM. (got it-thanks)