As a kid, I always swam in the ocean. But in 1975, I was a Senior in High School and during senior week, me and a few buddies went down to Ocean City. The movie JAWS had just come out, so we all stood in a line that stretched around the entire theater. We get in, watch the movie (GREAT friggin' movie), and then we went to the end of the boardwalk, where we stayed up all night shooting the breeze while sitting on a concrete wall between the boardwalk & dune. The sun came up and one of my buddies says "hey, let's go swimming". I looked at him like he was a moron and said "dude, I'm not getting into the water, it's dark, murky, we can't see a thing, and we just saw JAWS".
He then acted like I was the Moron, saying it was just a movie, blah, blah. So, after much back & forth I gave in, and we waded out into the water. We're out about waist/chest deep and everything's cool. I'm facing the waves with my back to the beach, the guy who said JAWS was only a movie is on my right side. I turned to say something to him, and he was totally frozen, eyes bulging, he didn't even blink. So, I turned my head to the left to see what he was looking at and there it was, a fin in the water probably about 50-75ft from us. I gotta say, the brain is frickin amazing, because in that split nanosecond of time, I had an unbelievable number of thoughts running through my head simultaneously, while I was coming very close to having a "Code Brown".
The Lord & his angels must have been with me because a nanosecond after the first nanosecond, after my heart stopped beating, the fin jumped out of the water, and it was a dolphin. I can't even begin to describe all the emotions running through me seeing that dolphin. Now, I know what a dolphin fin looks like, and what a shark fin looks like, and I can tell the difference between the two. But in that first nanosecond of time, my brain couldn't tell the difference, only that it was a fin in the water, it's close to us, we're in the water where the fin lives, and we need to get the heck out pronto. That experience must have given me PTSD, because I rarely go in the ocean with the wife when we're at the beach, but if I do, it's usually no deeper than ankle to knee deep. Same when I'm detecting, hunting the wet and moving into the water. I know there's probably gold & silver deeper out but going out waist/chest deep is a non-starter. It might be different if we had clear water where I could see something approaching, like in FL, but our water in MD & DE is dark & murky, and before you get knee deep you can't see your feet, so can't see anything lurking nearby.
Lastly, for all you beach hunters with beaches having fishing piers that jut out into the ocean and have always had that nagging thought that a lot of those people must have dropped all kinds of stuff over the pier and into the water, I'd highly suggest you stick to the wet only around fishing piers and forget about hunting into the water, at least deeper than your knees. Check out this video. A guy in FL hooked up a GoPro to his fishing line and dropped it into the water at several areas of the fishing pier: shallow water, mid-depth, then deeper water at the end of the pier. Since this fishing pier was in FL, the water is pretty clear, allowing us to see all the various creatures that like to swim around the pilings.
Watch the video and see if you would wade out into waist/chest deep water next to a fishing pier.
wsvn.com
