Treasure hunting

Over vacation I got sucked in by this show on the history channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Oak_Island. It does have a few of the whack conspiracy theories and other seemingly manufactured drama that you would expect from most history channel shows these days but it does have an element of intrigue that I find partically interesting.

TL;DR - I will try not to botch it up-

Back in 1795 a teenager finds a circular depression amid a clearing of trees on this island off of Nova Scotia called Oak Island above the clearing is a tackle block. The guy brings a few friends and starts digging. Every 10 feet they find logs and other items that are man made or that are not common to that part of the world. They only get to like 30 feet. A few years later a larger operation comes to investigate and continues to 90 feet where they find a stone with weird inscriptions. Just below that they trigger a “booby trap” which floods the tunnel. Bailing it does not cause the water, sea water, to lower. turns out that the cove which is about 100 feet away is man made. And 200 years of attempts to get at the “treasure” have ended in failure. Now two dudes are throwing a lot of money at trying to solve it with modern tech and being documented by history channel. (There is a whole lot more to this, for the long form see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island#The_Oak_Island_mystery.

Which brings me to the question, has anyone here ever done any treasure hunting of their own? I’m into hiking so i’ve been thinking of getting a metal detector to look for old coins and such.

I’ve not done treasure hunting, but my stepmother loved the Oak Island story. I believe it was on In Search Of. Narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

I wonder if youtube has the whole episode. Wait, here it is!

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ7PmnxCqdc]

I knew about the Oak Island story since I was a kid, so I was pretty excited for the show. I really liked the show at first… but after a while it got pretty tiresome. I still watch it – but I find myself forwarding through a lot of the show.

Good luck on the treasure hunting.

Let us know what the bottle cap-to-gold coin ratio is.

I always wondered what happened with that story. Thank you for posting.

anyone ever walk around beaches with a metal detector and actually find anything?

I’m trying to figure out what kind of detector to get so I can go nerd out on the beach or around an old mining camp or something since I live in CA. and it would be a good excuse to get out and go see some landmarks. What I gather from reviews and message boards on the matter is that the best bang for the buck is to buy in the mid range or get a higher end used detector that is a few years old. I hear that they have really improved the tech on newer detectors so that your not sitting there digging up trash the whole time but i’ll have to see for myself. Even if thats the case it should still be interesting.

yea i always thought it could be a cool retirement hobby.

there’s also that park in the US where you can dig for diamonds?

looks what i found in August

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/luxury/worlds-biggest-blue-star-sapphire/index.html