Gold, Diamonds and Cash This Month

  July was a good month for treasure hunting as you can surmise from the title above. Gold, diamonds and cash, woo-hoo!  First of all, the moneywalking continues to impress me. I was able to find 81 coins and two dollar bills on the ground or in machines as I wrote about in a post on July 16.  That was good for a total of $10.32 - not too shabby! I try to walk a few miles per day, and this year I combined that with searching for coins along my walks.  In 7 months I have found almost $48 in coins and bills laying on the ground or in machines.  I have gotten to the point that I expect to find coins now and they continue to turn up.



I took the metal detector out seven times and was able to come up with 213 coins that way.  It has been hot, hot, hot this Summer, though, and the ground is pretty well baked dry, so I've had to hunt in playgrounds for the most part, and only for short periods due to the heat. I was able to hunt along an ocean beach last week, and was lucky enough to find a 3-stone diamond necklace in the dry sand. That was a nice find and made the hunt.  The Ace 250 detector is pretty limited on the beach, though, it gives a lot of false signals on the wet sand, so I had to stay up on the dry sand.  I still was able to find quite a few coins and clean up a lot of pulltabs off the beach. 

Of course we both continued to hit the yard sales to see what treasure is out there.  I found another gold mesh Whiting and Davis evening bag, strangely enough.  This one cost a dollar. I can't believe what people sell stuff for sometimes but the economy is tough and people seem to be clearing out a lot of unneeded clutter. There were some other good finds too, but I can't remember them all now. 

Next week is the annual Shenandoah County 43-mile long yard sale.  We will be attending for the 3rd year in a row.  It's a lot of fun and great treasure hunting.  I will take some pics and write a post here on our adventures. Keep hunting!

Treasure In The News

I've run across several treasure stories here lately.  Maybe stories about treasure just catch my eye, but it just goes to show that there are treasures of all types being found every day.  Here are a few from the last week or two:

Bronze Cannon From 1715 Shipwreck Found - A salvage company recovered a bronze swivel gun from the 1715 Plate Fleet that sank off the east coast of Florida in a storm 300 years ago. The gun had 63 gold and silver coins inside it.  The fleet took on a cargo of millions of silver coins in Veracruz, Mexico. Most of that is still waiting to be found.

Superman Comic Saves Family From Foreclosure - A family facing foreclosure found a Superman comic book in the basement as they were packing up their belongings.  The comic turned out to be Action Comics Issue Number 1, from June 1938.  It introduced Superman to the world, and could be worth more then $250,000.

An 1885 Pocket Spill - A man using a metal detector found 7 cents in one hole along an old trail through the woods.  The coins are dated 1865 to 1885.  While not enough to retire on, they still are a neat treasure to find, and make you wonder whose pocket the coins slipped out of on that spot almost 125 years ago.  There's tons of it still out there, all around us.

Good Yard Sale Treasure Hunt

    This past weekend was a pretty good treasure hunting one in a strange way.  My significant other is the antique hunter and yard sale shopper extraordinaire.  I am more the coin and ring hunter, although I've developed a decent eye for antique styles, vintages, and marks over the years. Anyone who spends time pursuing the hobby of treasure hunting in all its forms has "inventory" collected up at home. So when a neighbor announced she was having an impromptu yard sale, we jumped onboard, a good opportunity to sell off some stuff and clear some space.  We didn't set up a lot of stuff, and it was a girls thing, so I was dispatched off to do the yard sale hunting, while she conducted the sale.  Perhaps a  bit perverse, but she didn't want to miss a Saturday's worth of sales, and I was ordered out.

  So off I went, and once I scored a $20 Hartstone checked mixing bowl at a moving sale for $1, the blood was flowing.  If you are into antiques at all, you know you can never know everything, and you can't be an expert in all fields.  At another moving sale, I pulled a porcelain doll out of a bin of junk. The person running the sale had no idea, and thought $1 sounded fair, so the doll came with me too.  Dolls are one area I know nothing about, but since she was in good shape, with porcelain head and hands, I figured she's worth more than that.  Things slowed down after that as the heat of the day rose.  I finally met a nice lady who just wanted to move some items.  I got a nice framed print and a wood dough bowl for $1 apiece, and a hanging corner cupboard for $2 (behind the blue pitcher).  We kind of lean towards colonial things, so these were all good captures.  Finally, as the morning wore down, at a sale with mostly household stuff and perfumes, I saw some old glassware on a table and inspected the blue carnival glass pitcher. Good shape.  "Are these cups a set with the pitcher?"  "Yes, $10"  Hem, haw, but don't put down the pitcher, "OK". done.  The blue punch cups are not actually a set with the pitcher, but they are all the same grape leaf pattern.  The cups are worth $8 a piece on Replacements.com, and I knew the pitcher was worth a few dollars since we have some experience with carnival glass.  Looked it up, it's worth $15-$35 on Ebay.  Not bad. 

   Wife was happy, guess I've still got it LOL.  It's all treasure.

How To Find Coins in Machines

I've been keeping up with the daily walks at lunchtime, although it's been in the 90's several days this month. Since I am walking, I am also always on the lookout for stray coins. I'm still surprised that there are so many coins out there in the wild. I've been able to find $5 to $8 consistently over the last few months.  I keep a jar in my desk and add coins to it that I find every day on my walks. Here is a link to a short article I wrote about strategies that I've been using successfully to find coins in machines.  You won't believe it until you try.  I just shake my head sometimes when coins come tumbling out of a machine.

I have to also say that I KNOW there are coins heading into my pocket if I just keep looking.  I know that because it's a rare day that I don't find any.  For that reason, I don't worry about it, I know they will come.  Interesting, but so far I haven't been proved wrong.  
Read the entire article, How To Find Coins in Machines. 

Treasure Hunter Digs Up 52,000 Roman Coins Worth Over $1 Million

A treasure hunter armed with a metal detector struck it rich in England recently, digging up a pot filled with over 52,000 Roman coins dated from the 3rd century AD. The pot weighed 350 pounds.  The finder, Dave Crisp, dug up a few of the coins, but then called archeologists.  The pot and contents have been transferred to the British Museum to be cleaned and catalogued.
Under Britain's Treasure Act, the finder and the landowner will split any proceeds of the sale of the treasure. Experts have not yet figured out why the coins were buried, or how they got there. According to Roger Bland, a coins expert at the museum, "No one individual could possibly have carried them to the field in the pot, it must have been buried first and then filled up." Not a bad day's work for that treasure hunter!  Read more here.

Yard Sale Gold Treasure

Well, it is finally Spring. After such a long Winter we thought it might not arrive.  And with Spring comes yard sale season.  Time to clean out Winter's clutter and make a few dollars. This is a great time of year for treasure hunting also.  You can find all kinds of treasures being sold in driveways and front yards.  My better half is the pro in this type of treasure hunting.  Although the season has only just started, she came up with this great jewelry last week.  The two bracelets are 14k gold, really nice, and cost $1 each. What can I say, if she paid retail for them they wouldn't be treasure, right?  The necklace and earrings are unmarked and are costume from the 1940's or 50's and were the same price. 

The gold mesh bag was today's find for a dollar.  It is is perfect condition, and has a row of diamonds or rhinestones across the top. Very nice, maybe 1930's vintage. We are just researching it now.  You just never know what is out there.  As Mel Fisher used to say, "Today's the Day!"

Visit a Gold Mining Ghost Town

Any treasure hunter dreams about ghost towns from time to time. Just don't get caught in one after dark!   The State of California has preserved an authentic gold-mining ghost town named Bodie that you can visit today.  I drove to Bodie several years ago and it is truly a neat place to visit.  The state has preserved it as it was left almost 100 years ago, with bottles still on the bar in the saloon, and boxes still on the shelves in the general store. Bodie boomed in the late 1870's when gold was discovered, and went from a population of 30 to over 10,000 in less than 4 years. Then big gold strikes were reported elsewhere, and the fortune seekers rushed off to stake their claims in places like Tombstone, Arizona. Bodie's Main Street, pictured here, once had 65 saloons on it, and all the mayhem that you can imagine.

Bodie is preserved as a State Historic Site today, so there's no treasure hunting allowed, but it is rich with memories and history.  Bodie is located between Yosemite and Lake Tahoe in eastern California.  For additional info and Bodie Photo gallery click here. Definitely visit if you have the opportunity.  Bodie is a piece of American hiistory you won't see elsewhere.