lordmarcovan
New member
This is my oldest coin found so far, but that's only part of the reason it's my favorite find. When I found it in 1998, Hurricane Earl was blowin' across the Florida panhandle to hit us from the landward side. I was out at a site in the woods that had been cleared (bush-mowed but not root-raked), and the wind was blowin' 40-50 MPH gusts, but there wasn't much rain. I wasn't getting many signals at all, and the few I did get were old iron nails. I was using a Fisher 1280-X underwater detector, which worked very well as a dry-land relic hunting machine. I was digging just about every signal.
One signal, near a big tree, was "hotter" than the rest, and I had to whack through a web of small roots to get into the soil. From a few inches down, a part of the neck of a very old black glass bottle came up, which was encouraging. Then, a a few more inches down, almost a foot deep overall, there was a little squarish piece of copper. I didn't recognize it as a coin, at first. I thought it was a seal of some sort.
My examination of the find was cut short when some men strolled into the clearing, asking if it was my van parked out by the road. I told them yes. They asked me to move it so they could clear the big tree that had fallen across the road, right in front of it! Off in my own little treasure-seeking world, I had been completely oblivious to things like dying hurricanes and wind and fallen trees! The hardwired headphones on that Fisher were very snug and shut out a lot of ambient noise.
A few months later, I met Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who was doing a story about the sinking of two tankers off our island by the German submarine U-123, in 1942. When my hobby came up in conversation, he expressed an interest in doing a little sidebar piece about my coin and its connection to the lost Santo Domingo de Asajo mission. (By this time I had identified the coin and sort of figured out the historical connection. A lot of the other details were filled in by Dr. John Worth, the scholar who Mr. Hendrick contacted for the story).
When the story ran in the paper, it was picked up by the AP and run in various places around the country. As a matter of fact, somebody I don't even know clipped it and submitted it to Western and Eastern Treasures, where it ran under the "Treasure In The News" column- I was surprised to read about my own find there!
Aside from its historical and archaeological significance, this coin has a very important sentimental value to me, as well. I was showing it and the newspaper clipping off at work, and struck up a conversation with a nice lady there.
We struck up a friendship, and were married in October of 1999.
So you can see why this coin is special to me on so many different levels. Even if I one day get to travel up north or overseas, and find an older coin, or am lucky enough to find a gold coin one day, this one will always be "THE" coin.
I'll let the newpaper clipping below tell the whole story of the find.
This site has a transcript of the article, if you find it difficult to read in the clipping:
http://www.swanet.org/zarchives/gotcaliche/alldailyeditions/99mar/myj030999.html
One signal, near a big tree, was "hotter" than the rest, and I had to whack through a web of small roots to get into the soil. From a few inches down, a part of the neck of a very old black glass bottle came up, which was encouraging. Then, a a few more inches down, almost a foot deep overall, there was a little squarish piece of copper. I didn't recognize it as a coin, at first. I thought it was a seal of some sort.
My examination of the find was cut short when some men strolled into the clearing, asking if it was my van parked out by the road. I told them yes. They asked me to move it so they could clear the big tree that had fallen across the road, right in front of it! Off in my own little treasure-seeking world, I had been completely oblivious to things like dying hurricanes and wind and fallen trees! The hardwired headphones on that Fisher were very snug and shut out a lot of ambient noise.
A few months later, I met Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who was doing a story about the sinking of two tankers off our island by the German submarine U-123, in 1942. When my hobby came up in conversation, he expressed an interest in doing a little sidebar piece about my coin and its connection to the lost Santo Domingo de Asajo mission. (By this time I had identified the coin and sort of figured out the historical connection. A lot of the other details were filled in by Dr. John Worth, the scholar who Mr. Hendrick contacted for the story).
When the story ran in the paper, it was picked up by the AP and run in various places around the country. As a matter of fact, somebody I don't even know clipped it and submitted it to Western and Eastern Treasures, where it ran under the "Treasure In The News" column- I was surprised to read about my own find there!
Aside from its historical and archaeological significance, this coin has a very important sentimental value to me, as well. I was showing it and the newspaper clipping off at work, and struck up a conversation with a nice lady there.
We struck up a friendship, and were married in October of 1999.
So you can see why this coin is special to me on so many different levels. Even if I one day get to travel up north or overseas, and find an older coin, or am lucky enough to find a gold coin one day, this one will always be "THE" coin.
I'll let the newpaper clipping below tell the whole story of the find.
This site has a transcript of the article, if you find it difficult to read in the clipping:
http://www.swanet.org/zarchives/gotcaliche/alldailyeditions/99mar/myj030999.html
