Digging around in the ocean you find lots of peculiar items, which, if you crawled around on land with a garden hose and metal detector you might also find. Underwater, you are right down there on the bottom, hands and knees, with the power of the water to make sifting and fanning away the dirt that much easier. Mastodon teeth, dinosaur eggs, fossilized bones, pig teeth, fossilized turtle shells, pottery, you never know. But there's lots of junk too, and I make a habit of picking up everything: hooks, sinkers, leaders, pop tops, bottle caps, bullets, broken glass... everything. I wear shorts with pockets so I can stuff all the garbage in them until they won't hold any more and I bring it up to the garbage can on deck.
Hole 205 had a broken crucifix, ballast and a silver candle stick. Also the usual collection of junk. Took 2 weeks to find the whole candle stick. At the end of the day, I got home and found this little piece of copper in my pocket. Looked for sure like a piece of a fishing lure. I threw it in to a silver Chinese vase I have on the book shelf. That was five years ago.
About a week ago I was talking on the phone with someone and casually picked up the vase and heard the tinkle of the long-forgotten copper doodad. Took it out and looked at it again, this time very closely. I then recognized it as a hand carved figure of a rattlesnake, complete with scales, rattle and little round eyes on the head! It took me a week to figure out what it is. I think it is a nose ornament, or maybe a pierced ear ornament. Question is: was it there before the wreck, or did it get there with the wreck?
You never know what you might find in the ocean. The thing is curved, so this scanned picture makes it impossible to see the details of the head and tail in the scanner's focal plane. Sorry. Don't have a real good camera for something this small.
Minelab Explorer and Excalibur; Tesoro Tejon; Fisher 1265-X; Garrett Master Hunter; White's Coinmaster; In closet: Bounty Hunter and Relco
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Water Hunting; Beachcombing; Relic Hunting; Shipwrecks
Looks more like a broken end of a buckle and can be if it has any flatness. Don't know about wreck history of your dive site, however, if in Florida and more than 150 years old, remember the early spanish and other salvors utilized local indians to dive on the wrecks.
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