Not a coin but something each ship’s navigator was required have and use to sail from Spain to Cuba and farther. I was watching the Treasure Coast beaches during several days of strong wind, this time out of the south; not as good as NNE but still stirs the sand and removes some, it just opens and closes quicker. Reading the beach, I noticed a very low area exposed by the outgoing tide. Taking a scoop of sand showed only a little beach sand covered the old, orange coquina gritty original beach. That was good news even if conditions were not very exciting. I ignored iron targets using the Equinox F2 control and the horseshoe button to focus on non ferrous metals. There were no ring pulls, bobby pins or pennies which was strange. But with sand lost many light metals just were not there. A good strong signal in both directions, but I used the all metal horeshoe to interrigate the target. No iron grunts! Wavelets were making recovery difficult but I got it int he scoop = one of the largest pyramid sinkers I had seen. Been there a while from the white coating. I spiraled around but found no other targets. Kept an eye on the approximate spot and stayed parallel as much as possible. Another strong target but different VDI and tone. Target interrogation revealed it too was non-ferrous. Dug up a chunk of copper slag green with corrosion. Now I had a line, and after searching in a circle, kept going relative to the last two targets when i gat a hit. This time had to double scoop to beat the waves at low tide. Pulled the scoop, checked the hole to make sure I had it and walked up the beach to dump it. Saw the legs sticking our and my first thought was “an old tractor hitch pin of some kind”. Cleaned it off and knew from my time spent with nautical charts and drafting, it was a divider. Used to ‘walk off’ distance or transfer a measurement to another part of the chart. And it was old! I found two documents; one by J. Clausen, an archeologist that worked with state and on several sites including the Winter Beach Survivors camp and authored the book “A 1715 Treasure Ship”; the other photographic evidence of time period was held by a private collector, Lou Ullian. https://1715fleetsociety.com/lou-ullian-personal-collection-treasure-photographs/ I have included a picture of a restored divider said to be from a 1700’s Dutch sailing ship. One of my most interesting artifacts. Happy New Year everyone!
