Just got back from a trip to Florida's west coast, heavily sanded in beaches. I found 22 quarters,14 nickels,32 dimes 58 pennies ,a brass token,a brass porthole fitting,a lead minnow,3 lead fishing wgts.,a couple of 100 beer cans,pop tops and the only gold item I found was a Gold colored condom wrapper. Also I thought it rather odd but my wife and me were waking on the beach hunting seashells and I saw some black rounded rocks in one location. My first thought was ballast stones, maybe a ship wreak nearby. I started digging them out of the sand,which I might add was over our heads by about 3 ft.from their recent beach restoration. These rocks felt solid at first but were heavily encrusted with sand. I thought this would be odd that they would be very abrasive to a wooden ships hull. I grabbed one about the size of a softball and attempted to try and break it apart. When I started the squeeze on it, it felt spongy. I broke it apart and it was a tar ball. I don't know where they got their donor sand but it sounds to me like they may have covered up what they were trying to cover up. I had a great trip but now I'm back to the dirt mining.
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My first trip to the beach with ATPRO
- Thread starter Grunter
- Start date
When I was a kid and going to the NJ shore we always found tar balls coated and filled with sand, but not as big as you describe. It is normal for oils to do this but would surely suspect where they may have come from but then again they could have come from any other well too. The ones in Jersey we were told came from ships pumping bilge water out way out at sea and then moving to shore with the tides and currents. I seriously doubt anyone was trying to cover that oil up from that well. Something like that would be too obvious and require tremendous pumps and ships. Just as an aside to that, what ever happened to the generations of damage to fishing and everything the "experts" all predicted? Seems from the shrimp shows there is a great abundance of shrimp and such in the Gulf in spite of that spill and as I live in Florida, there is a lot of news about how well the Gulf tourists have returned. Reminds me about the comments during the first Iraq war of predictions of years to put out the fires Saddam started, they were all out in less than a month. So much for the "experts".
Johnho said:
I wish that were so. I am over here in Kuwait. The shrimp fishing was recently closed due to pollution and over shrimping. The shrimp can't seem to reproduce as well with all the pollution. Also, this part of the Persian/Arabian gulf used to be one of the largest natural pearl producing areas in the world. Repeated surveys have not found any pearls larger than a BB since the war ended 20 years ago. I guess that some things aren't as bad as some people said they would be, but they sure aren't as good as the were before all that oil went into the environment. I am no expert on oil or marine biology, but I can assure you that shrimp at the grocery store here is getting pretty expensive.
I know that there are places in the desert here where the spilled oil pools have largely dried up, and they look like sandy asphalt parking lots (some with hills and valleys). Where the oil stayed on the land, nothing grows. I don't know what the sea bottom looks like here, but some of my friends here who scuba say that the reefs are dying.
If anyone is curious, get on youtube and find the videos about the "Fires of Kuwait". The amount of oil spilled and burned is a lot larger than you might imagine.
BTW, I grew up in OKla., where most every well in on a jack. Over here, the oil pools have plenty of pressure. Any and every well would be a gusher, if they didn't keep them from it. Most of Kuwait is underlain by a kind of rotten limestone that collapses as the oil is withdrawn. Parts of Q8 have dropped 5 feet already.
HH,
Joihn Morton
After reading a number of post about what folks have found in what appears to be tar balls, I'll detect them next time. I had a great time on the gulf and there appeared to be alot of seafood but it was priced kinda steep. My comment about the cover up was that someone tried to cover up the beach with sand that had trapped some tarballs from a donor bar in the gulf.
Dancer
Well-known member
Been down here on PCB beaches for about 5 weeks now. It's a real challange, a quarter is a real treasure, pennies and pull tabs the norm. Not even a piece of silver and I've dug 385 coins & hundreds of pull tabs and worse, buried alum. cans. I got another 5 weeks to go-- somethings got to break!
Dancer, I was at PCB. If you have the opportunity go out to St. Andrews State Park. No where near the trash but coins and other oddities are to be found. Go down behind Spinnakers and Club Le vela after the spring breakers have been there. Also the west end of the beach appears to be better than the east end.