Re: I'm Coming Back for More!
Day 2 started with......sleep :P
Got to bed around 7:30AM and slept until 1:00PM. Then it was off to the North Shore to check out a spot that I had been told about by another collector. BTW - big mahalos for the info!
We had good directions and satellite photos from Google Maps to back them up. Unfortunately, there have been several new roads put in since the Google photos were taken and we got a bit lost at first. After driving about for a bit we figured it out and found the spot. It looks like a mix of old BIMAL bottles with newer stuff maybe up to the 60's or so. We were only there to look though and didn't break out the tools.
We then checked out another spot my brother heard about on the NS, but it looks like it's completely dug out. Too bad too, it looked like some good stuff based on the broken glass on the surface!
A quick drive back over the hill and we were back at our night time spot (not the Tar Pits!). We quickly picked our spot and started digging with enthusiasm. About a foot down I recieved a big surprise. While I was blasting through some hard coral fill with the o'o, I suddenly hit a void and the o'o dropped down into the Earth.
I was shocked, we were already a foot down and the o'o is 5 feet long. My brother thought we had just hit the undermine from an old hole, but we both knew that the bottom of the dump layer there was only about 4 feet down. Well, we couldn't afford to lose the use of our o'o so early in the dig, so we dug down to look for it. It hadn't gone far, and we quickly found the blade portion a few inches below the floor of our hole. To my surprize, I couldn't pull it out because it was wedged in by a couple of small pieces of coral. I grabbed the hook probe to pop them lose, but I pinched the top of the o'o with my other hand just in case. Sure enough, when the pebble popped loose the o'o started to drop again. I held on tight and managed to pull it up - thank god!
We avoided that corner of the hole and kept digging down. When we were down about 3 feet we found a weird plastic cap in the same corner of the hole and removed it. Under it was a void that went all the way down to the water table - about 7 feet - and didn't stop there. Our best guess is that someone drilled down at least 10 feet with an auger, capped the hole 3 feet down and then filled the top of the hole with gravel. The plastic cap was designed to pass water, so I guess it was intended to provide water drainage?
We looked down into this hole and saw......bottles! Lots and lots of bottles stacked one on top of the other. I had never seen so many bottles exposed in such a small area. The auger hole was only about 8 to 10 inches in diameter and I counted at least 5 intact bottles exposed in the sides and several more that had been broken by the auger. If the bottles were that thick under our entire hole I estimated that we were going to pull between 300 and 400 bottles!
The dump layer turned out to be good, but not quite THAT good. We ended up pulling 115 intact BIMAL bottles that night, about 35 of which were keepers. We left 80 pefectly good BIMAL bottles in the bush next to the hole for other folks to take home if they want. These mostly consisted of blank beer, sake, champagn and wine bottles. There was also a soy pot, some small aqua condiment bottles and some slightly damaged embossed bottles. Here's a somewhat blurry picture of them next to their bush.
LOL...nice finds too ...love those marble stoppers so cool and unique bottles...lets see some pictures after they are cleaned up and let everyone drool on the bottles 
