Have the California rains resulted in more finds?

[FoundHere]

With the heavy California rains, treasure hunters may find items of value resulting from storm-runoff.

It seems the best places for treasure hunting are those beaches where storm-runoff flows to the ocean. Be advised: Many of these areas receive health department advisories for bacterial runoff; advisories active usually until a few-days after rains stop. Best to allow health dept. advisories to expire before treasure-hunting at or near runoff outlets.

 

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[Mackaydon]

More finds? I doubt it. I think I'm in the majority of those who will wait out these rains before getting back to the beach UNLESS conditions create a cut in the sand of about 4 feet or more.
Welcome to Treasure Net !!
Don........

 

[FCCDFEd]

Don't know, it's way to wet and muddy to go Mding, I hope so but if not I'll still have fun. FYI rain total in my immediate area is above 7 inches in 4 days.

 

[Mackaydon]

And here's another 4-day record just set:
Ten feet of snow (no typo) in four days at Mammoth Ski Resort.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

There is a common misconception that rains are what makes for good beach erosion hunting. Good beach erosion hunting has nothing to do with precipitation.

Beach erosion is caused by high swells combined with high tides, not rains. Onshore winds help too. These conditions can happen with no local adverse weather (rain) at all. This is because these swells can start way out in the Pacific ocean, and travel thousand of miles and arrive on our coast. I've even seen pounding erosive swells arriving on sunny days. 8)

Yes it's true that often the storms (rain) arrive with swells at the same time. But this recent round of heavy rains, which you write about, have no swells connected to them. The seas have been very calm the last few days.

Some southern facing beaches did get some onshore southern winds but nothing spectacular, as they were not combined with swells.

 

[FoundHere]

More finds? I doubt it. I think I'm in the majority of those who will wait out these rains before getting back to the beach UNLESS conditions create a cut in the sand of about 4 feet or more.
Welcome to Treasure Net !!
Don........

Now that the rains have stopped, we hope that finds with even small values will show up on the 'TreasureNet By Location -- California' Forum. (Scroll-down to bottom Forum).

Quite a few "treasure hunters" will be eager to comb beaches; esp. those of us who receive metal detectors as holiday gifts!

Best holiday wishes, good luck on finding those awesome finds!

 

[boogeyman]

Main beach at Laguna. Last time the beach got scoured (1984 )we pulled pocket fulls just eyeballing. When the rain backed off the detectors came out. Might not be true for other areas but main beach under the sand is like a giant sluice box.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

boogeyman, were you detecting then too on the CA beaches? It was the winter of 1982 and into through to the spring of '83. That long winter had something like 7 winter storms, each one arriving with pounding 20 ft.+ swells, coinciding each time with the highest high tides. I know a guy from So. CA, who had an entire week, of no less than 100 silver coins, each day, all week long. Some of those days had gold jewelry counts of a dozen or more. It was just insane, as you say.

A buddy of mine up here (Monterey bay) during that event, stumbled onto some old concrete K-rail sections (an attempt in the 1930's to slow beach erosion), that got exposed during that erosion event. As the sand got pulled off the beach, the long K-rail sections which had been laid perpendicular to the beach, acted as a sort of "riffle board" catching all the heavier metal targets. He just put down his machine and sifted blindly for hours, at the base of the concrete mess, with his sand scoop. Each scoop would contain handfuls of coins, sinkers, nails, etc..... He too had over 100 silver coins that day, and 7 or 8 gold items.

 

[boogeyman]

Thanks for clearing the fog on the year Yeah, it was insane. Every time we thought we'd give it up for the day, we'd spot tons more. I think the little taco shop there on PCH made a small fortune on us selling coffee. Later on, they dredged & blew sand back up on the beach,and that turned out to be another small bonanza. A good friend died at the Wedge bodysurfing that same year.

You think were at the point of the cycle for the big three day storms again?

 

[Tom_in_CA]

boogeyman, are you asking if storms like '82-83 are due to hit again? Well, they called that the "hundred year storm" (or more correctly would be storms plural, since they were a series, back-to-back). So seems like we have nearly 70 more years to go, before we see that again

In the winter of '96-97 we had some big storms, with heavy swells, that coincided with high tides.

Actually, individual storms, like any of those that happened during '82 - '83, aren't that unusual. What made that year unusual, was each one coincidentally occured at *just* the peak tide times of the months.

I listened to a lecture, in the early 1990s, given by an expert ("Gary Griggs", a scientist from UCSC) on beach erosion. As a case study, he had studied that winter inparticular, since it did so much damage to beach side communities, cliffs, wharves, etc.... What amazed me in his lecture, was when he put up an over-lapping slide show presentation: First he put up a tide chart for that year, in a graph style, which showed the usual peaks of how high the high tides go during the monthly cycles. Then he over-lapped that with another slide showing the arrival times of the massive storms (with their accompanying swells). They coincided perfectly! He concluded by saying that in any given winter, there is bound to be a few storms. And in any given winter, there are also several astronomical extremes in the tides (those super plus highs, and super minus lows). And he said that the odds are, you *might* get one, or perhaps 2 to coincidentally occur at the same time. But in '82-83, every single storm, coincided with every single astronomical high. So by the time the subsequent ones would hit, the beaches hadn't even had time to recoup or sand-back-in yet. So the subsequent ones would just keep building off the earlier ones. Some beaches even got down to bedrock. Other's had cuts 10 to 20 ft. tall! (Lord help you if you got caught up against one of those metal detecting when a wave came, as you had no where to retreat to!).

And there was even a spring storm (April or May of '83) that continued where the earlier ones had left off that year. And as late as June, silver was still coming off the beaches, when the sandbars eventually broke up and came back on shore. I was only in my very early 20s then, and didn't really understand beach hunting, nor could I get out of work to go hunt when I wanted, nor did I have a good beach machine. But I got a taste of it, and saw what some other guys closer to the beach got.

So while I have seen individual storms and good erosion since then, they tend to last a mere week or so, not endless months like that year did.

 

[boogeyman]

Yeah, I remember everyone seemed to be using the Hundred year storm buzz word. Would've been neat to have seen that lecture! Talking about + & - tides, we all had the tide books the bait shops would hand out free. I think I might still have one still. Needless to say all the - tides were underlined in red. I lived either on the beach or walking distance growing up. Usually work never interfered too much with hunting, although there were many times I went to work with sand in my tennies gripping the large coffee in both hands It'd be interesting to see if the hundred year theory is shortening up any, especially with the weather patterns this year.

On a side note, I remember watching them build the groins at Huntington Beach. There were a lot of people saying it wouldn't work & was just a waste of money. A few months back I was showing a friend some places that used to be good hunting spots on Google earth. The groins have worked very well over the years.