Searching for treasures along river banks and on public beaches
Almost all are large settlements Russia is located along the banks of rivers, lakes and seas. What if we consider that part of the land that is washed by water on one side and adjacent to the embankment on the other, like a gold-bearing placer? I’m not advocating testing coastal sediments on the city beach (although this is exactly what the residents of Yekaterinburg did in the last century, right there in the city, handing over the gold they found to the mining police officer), but, armed with a search device, walking along the water itself - this can turn out to be a very profitable activity. The embankment is a favorite place for city residents to walk, and therefore a place for minor losses. Valuables are often thrown into the water to get rid of evidence, or in revenge on someone. Here, for example, is such a case described in the “Bulletin of the Gold Industry” for 1899:
“Recently in one of the villages close to Irkutsk, some swindler, fearing prosecution for the gold he had stolen from the mines, he threw it, in the amount of three pounds, from the shore into the Angara River.”
Many valuables were dropped into the water on piers, steamship gangways, when unloading ships, and were lost when unloading into warehouses. And the water itself, doing its daily work and carrying away light particles, “washes” the cultural layer of coastal soil, thereby concentrating heavy objects in places of erosion. In order for the search to be successful, two factors need to be taken into account - firstly, to study the old plan of the city or village in order to draw up a tentative scheme of work, and secondly, to take into account physical changes in the riverbed under the influence of natural forces or human engineering activities. Of course, the section of the coast where erosion of the soil and the demolition of its light components is more promising than the place where siltation occurs. The main thing is to select the area so that natural forces work in the right direction.
City beaches - special zone attention of a mini-treasure hunter, or rather, the place of search lost valuables. The more people visit the beaches, the more decorations are lost here - sand and small pebbles serve as an excellent shelter from the eyes of absent-minded owners. You can, in a useless search, sift sand through your fingers for a long time ten centimeters from your loss. I came across press reports that in In many countries around the world, where there are comfortable beaches and the gentle sun shines, the business of searching for lost jewelry using metal detectors is thriving. According to unverified data, a similar fishery also exists on the Black Sea coast. It can be assumed that it brings in considerable income. For such work, particularly sensitive instruments are not required - 10-15 cm of detection depth is quite enough. Of course, you will come across a lot of low-value items, especially, I think, the searcher will become irritated by the abundance of coins and traffic jams. What to do, you will have to endure - fortunately, the drip is shallow.
It may happen that not only a lost ring or watch will become the prey of a specialist in extracting beach treasures. Sea waves, as is known, have enormous power near the shore. During a storm, boulders spin in the waves like soccer balls. Approximately the same thing happens at shallow depths near the surf, but the greater the depth of the sea layer, the less the impact of wave energy on the bottom.
Ships lost in different times on coastal underwater rocks and shallows, sank to the bottom, where they were subjected to inexorable destruction under the pressure of waves and the effects of salt water. The contents of the holds and cabins sank to the seabed. What is the further path of objects from ship holds? Much depends on the topography of the bottom and the depth at the site of the disaster: sometimes the wreckage is buried under a layer of sand, and sometimes it moves to the shore with a mass of boulders and pebbles. For example, when sediments move transversely (relative to the coastline) by sea waves on a flat bottom, sand is carried to great depths, and pebbles and boulders are thrown toward the shore.
As an illustration, I will cite a case described by Professor V.P. Zenkovich.
In 1946, the professor was in Kamchatka, on the shore Pacific Ocean. The border guards showed him heavy naval binoculars, eaten away sea water and overgrown with shells. They found this binoculars one day, after a storm, on the shore; it was thrown out by the waves from a ship that sank at a depth of 40 meters. From this depth, the waves more than once threw various iron fragments onto the shore, and a year later the binoculars turned up on the beach.
The following fact also speaks about the bottom disturbance of unusual strength. In the Sea of Japan, south of
Vladivostok, an anchor weighing almost 300 kg was dropped from one ship. The following year the anchor was thrown ashore.
Sea waves can serve another service to the treasure hunter, namely: act as a hydromonitor, eroding the cultural layer of the earth on the coast, where active destruction of the coast is underway.
After a storm, during which the erosion process intensifies many times over, you can go with a metal detector along the erosion strip and search in the enriched cultural layer, due to the removal of light soils, for antiquities, if any are implied in the search area based on the historical situation.
If you take a little interest in the geological history of the coast, you may be able to find areas that are promising for searching for valuables. As you know, the soil sometimes rises, and sometimes, on the contrary, it sinks and is absorbed by the waters of the seas. Sometimes the processes go very slowly, sometimes faster, but there are also rapid changes in land level: catastrophic rises or falls of soil during an earthquake. Let us assume that some coastline, rich in historical monuments, is plunging into sea waters. There are many such plots of land, particularly in neighboring countries. Then, as a result of a sharp rise in land, a site - for example, an ancient settlement - lying above the water for centuries, again finds itself under the sun, providing those who wish with the opportunity to look for ancient treasures in the soil eroded by the sea.
On the beach, if the water is warm, you can search for valuables without a device - visual observation in the surf. Try looking at land from water. The rationale is simple: the golden objects are static, and the sand and pebbles, constantly moved back and forth by the breaking wave, either expose or cover these objects again. The same process occurs on the shore side. But the surf line is viewed mainly from land, and not from under water. I had to talk with people who struggled with the Black Sea summer boredom in exactly this way. This is what they advised.
For this practice you need a mask with a snorkel. No fins are needed; the seeker swims very slowly along the surf and, as a specialist in this type of fishing figuratively puts it, “rubs the sand with his belly.” The observation is carried out directly in front of you, because the golden barrel of the jewel flashes only for a moment in the endless crowd of grains of sand or small pebbles. It is most convenient to conduct a search when the sea is lightly rough, because with large waves there is a problem with swimming, and during calm periods there is no necessary movement of the bottom sands.
I don’t know all the details of the incident that led to the fact that the deep river in my village turned in places into a thin bubbling stream. Due to the lack of water, the banks exposed their silt bottom, and the riverbed showed stones and shells.
This incident upset fishermen and vacationers, of whom there are more than enough on the banks of the river in the summer. Some are sad, some are happy. After all, for a treasure hunter, digging in an untouched place is always a blessing. Places that haven't seen a man with a detector and a shovel will bring interesting finds even to the seeker who will search with an inexpensive Chinese metal detector.
There were so many diggers that the local population was already accustomed to a person with a metal detector in his hands and therefore did not react to them in any way. Unless in rare cases they ask how much gold you found and, hearing laughter in response, go home. So it is not at all surprising that after just one month the muddy shores already looked like a lunar landscape.
Features of digging along the river bottom.
I myself was wildly curious: what can be found in the shallows with a metal detector.
In the evening he went ashore and, wading into the water up to his ankles, carried out his search until nightfall.
For searching shallows without a scuba, a pinpointer becomes indispensable. My pointer from MarsMD coped with such a cop perfectly well.
I tried to search with different devices and with different coils, but the result was always almost the same - scrap metal and a couple of tips.
Reader, I never thought that a river could be such an open dump - every centimeter of wiring was a coil, and sometimes only a millimeter and I heard a signal from the iron. If the detector responds with a color response, then it is either a wire, or a cork, or the bottom of a tin can. Less commonly: foil, stainless steel jars and batteries.
I wasn’t the only one who dug such an assortment - dug up garbage finds were littered along the banks. But a river, on the banks of which a settlement has existed for many centuries, must hide in its depths something more significant, and not just garbage! But, alas, all the ancient artifacts are buried under a thick layer of mismanagement of the Soviet era.
Then the diggers, including me, began to look only on the beaches. More than once I observed guys digging sand and after some time leaving the search site. And all because those beaches where people still swim, I dug up with my comrade a few years ago.
And I was productively digging on those shores where there once were beaches. I remember them from my childhood, but now these places are overgrown with sedge, and the bottom is covered with silt.
What’s amazing: every other coil is in the same place, sniffing out some kind of find. This is not surprising - after all, the little Nel Sharp collected surface targets at 5 inches, the round AKA staff saw whatever it wanted, but the 3-frequency Tornado sensed targets perfectly, but in places where there was an abundance of iron it was as blind as a mole.
Also from finds on the edge of places former bathing you come across all sorts of fishing gear: spoons, drachas, jigs, lead sinkers.
There are a lot of abandoned small beaches, but I only managed to knock out two. On the second, also not noticed by other diggers, late Soviet and modern coins popped out one after another.
If it were not for the abundance of garbage, then spending time with a metal detector along the river bottom would be much more interesting.
Another important point river cop.
When digging beaches, we must not forget about the paths used to reach the swimming areas. I can only guess about the level of digging experience of the comrades who rummaged around with detectors along the river bottom, since the trails remained virgin. Climb out of the hollow of the dry banks and dig for at least something interesting. After all, it’s always nice to dig for a coin, even if it was lost relatively recently. Do you agree?
My modest result.
Every time I brought finds from a mine down the drained river, I put them in one bag. And so, when the water in the river returned to its usual level, he took out the coins and “jewelry” from the bag to show his modest result to his reader.
We all love to swim, that’s a fact, and we look forward to the July sun warming the water so that we can swim and sunbathe. Do you think people swam in the old days? Or did they just work to survive? I think the answer is obvious - our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, just like us, loved to swim. Therefore, in such places you can always find something interesting with a metal detector. So let's talk about a few more places where you can hang out with MD and sip some coins.
Reservoirs - rivers, lakes and ponds.
Any village was always located not far from some body of water. Therefore, if you are breaking through an ancient village, look for this very body of water - it could be a river, or maybe a lake or pond. Of course, over many years the pond could dry out or the river become shallow, so if it is possible to use old map, do this and establish where the river flowed or there was a pond.
Well, then you can start searching. Coins, as a rule, were most often lost in elevated places where people undressed and where clothes were left lying. Therefore, if you notice a pond near a village, then think about where you entered the water, and where the people “laid back.” At the “lying places” and break through with a detector, there will be one hundred percent finds. Of course, if the village is not old, then you will come across a lot of Soviet coins and other lost items. However, sometimes you manage to catch some pretty interesting things. On this hill we also managed to pick up a couple of coins.
We had this kind of medal, not a military one, but for merit, I don’t remember exactly now, something like for work. Plus, once they found as many as 7 pieces of Soviet coins and a half-rotten paper coin at once. Soviet ruble. Remember him? Orange like that. Apparently, someone dropped their wallet, it rotted, but the money remained)) It was very cool to dig up several caked coins at once. Even if they don’t cost anything, we don’t dig for profit, but for adrenaline and pleasure.
Next, another place where we managed to “exchange money” was streams and crossings. In general, a lot of interesting things are hidden in streams. Judge for yourself - there is a ravine, in the spring melt water flows through it and washes out of the ground everything that is there. And if the ravine is located on the edge of a plowed field, then a lot of things can be raised in the stream below. I remember once, having combed through a very shallow stream, we only found 3 coins with our eyes. And two more metal detectors))
What can you find on the old beach?
First of all, these are, of course, coins; you often come across buttons, badges, medals, crosses, rings and other decorations. All that you yourself can lose on the beach. It is unlikely that you will find dishes and other items there that can be found in vegetable gardens and next to house pits.
Well, naturally, the old beach can also be considered a swimming place, if you can find one. We were lucky, right next to my house, where I was born (I don’t live there anymore), there was a dilapidated village, judging by the houses of the year, about the end of the 18th century. Powerful old houses made of red brick with meter-high walls - such houses are beyond the control of time, it seems to me. They have been standing for more than 100 years and will easily last the same amount of time.
Well, in front of this village there is a river flowing and there is a huge sandy beach. Even 50 years ago, as my grandmother told me, they went there to swim, and their parents showed her this place. So we can estimate that this beach has been there for quite a long time, the river bed has not changed for at least 70 years. That is, there has been a beach in that place from time immemorial. And we, waiting until late autumn, when the water level is low and there are no people there, rushed there.
There were few finds, but it was a cool search. It all started with the fact that for the first time in my life I picked up a silver ring, massive, you can immediately see that it is old. Looking later at the sample, I saw a girl in a kokoshnik - as I later found out, this sample actually means that the silver is antique. I was very happy about the find.
My friend began to pick up tons of modern little things, after all, this beach is also used by the modern population and they have “crashed” it decently. Corks from vodka (who even drinks vodka in the heat?), from beer, labels from Coca-Cola and other fizzy drinks, and cans from them. We soon learned to cut out all the modern garbage, but sometimes we still dug the usual “garbage” signal, because we knew that gold sometimes sounds exactly like a cork or some other crap.
By the way, you can - what can you find and where is the best place to look.
We wandered around that beach for a couple of days and at the end of the second day we began to come across ancient coins - kopeks of Nicholas II, most of the coins of that era. Two rubles and even three rubles. As we thought, initially we identified the place a little incorrectly, but this is not surprising, over so many years the terrain is changing anyway. But the fact itself pleased us - we found an old beach and hit it a little. We found a dozen copper coins and it was cool.
Based on everything described, we can draw conclusions about where there is a chance to raise coins besides ancient roads and vegetable gardens in an abandoned village:
- Comb the area near the pond, try to find a “bed”
- If the area is gully, then rustle at the bottom of the ravine in the streams (if you look in the spring, there will be a hundred pounds of streams)
- If there is a river, then there must be a place where people sunbathed - we are looking for an ancient sandy beach
- A dried up pond - in the spring, of course, there will be chacha in such a place, but in the summer you can try to look there, comrades wrote to me that there were finds, and royal, ancient coins.
Therefore, you should not neglect such publicly accessible places. Of course, it’s more interesting in the center of the village, but what if there’s nothing there? Then immediately run headlong to the reservoirs and start searching on the banks. Well, good luck with the coping, comrades.
Many reservoirs, rivers and lakes hide a large number of treasures. Just imagine how many people, throughout the entire period of monetary circulation, have betrayed their valuables to water, some on purpose, and some completely by accident.
For treasure hunters, this is a special search line that requires special knowledge and skill.
We will not now touch on those treasure hunters who dive in special scuba equipment in search of sunken ships.
Let's consider a search that does not require expensive underwater equipment, but only requires great desire and diligence.
The ruins of ancient mills and old bridges are considered “fishing” places for the presence of treasures. Almost any map of the early 20th century has marks of these places on it. After studying the maps, you should get a good handle on the area and start searching. You can use as landmarks the overgrown and abandoned mill foundations or old piles sticking out of the water, indicating the early presence of a bridge here.
Believe me, many people have seen these places in their lifetime. A large number of coins were accidentally lost here, and such places served as excellent landmarks for burying treasure. The main task of the treasure hunter is to search for these coins, both in the water and on the shore.
To search, you will need a rather simple tool in the form of a specially made bucket with many holes in its bottom. This technology is quite simple and not everyone will like it. With this scoop you will need to sort of sift through the semi-liquid soil of the bottom. Then all the more or less large objects remain in the bucket.
When I first learned about this method, I decided to try it anyway, since I didn’t have a metal detector then. I made a scoop from a metal mesh and went fishing. I chose an old bridge, of which only piles reminded me, on the Barneva River as the place to search. It’s fortunate that the water was warm at that time, since I had to spend more than five hours in it, reseeding the river bottom and shoveling a whole heap of silt.
But still I came across a few finds. These were Soviet nickels from the thirties, a castle and a bell. I will not mention various garbage. A few years later, I returned to this place only with a metal detector; I had to wander along the shore for a long time before finding only five coins - one kopeck of Nicholas II and the rest from the Soviet period.
Apparently, this bridge was not the most crowded. In your search, it is important to determine how the river bed has changed, and the surest option is to find approximate horse sites. According to stories knowledgeable people such places are very rich in treasures. There are a lot of stories that during the period of dispossession, many millers hid their savings in bags made of leather and tied them to a heavy anvil and hid them under the mill in the water. Of course, some still did not have time to take their goods. It’s not hard to guess what kind of metal the millers hid in bags at the bottom of the river.
Springs can also be hiding places for treasures. But you can hide small treasures in them. But basically, springs serve only as a guide and the treasure can be hidden at some distance. Therefore, shoveling the entire surrounding area is completely pointless. It will be much more useful to examine the spring. For these purposes, a rod made of iron with a length of about one and a half meters is used. With such a probe it is easy to pierce the entire area of the spring in the hope of stumbling upon a treasure by feeling something solid. Always remember that patience and work will grind everything down. Good luck with your catch.
Searching for coins and treasures along the banks of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs is a very promising business, and when the right approach can bring a lot of finds.
I think all treasure hunters know that they tried to build settlements near natural reservoirs. It was not by chance that our ancestors had such a desire.
The proximity of water was very great value, since in those distant past times there was no pipeline or tap with hot and cold water.
In the reservoir: they washed clothes, bathed and washed, took water for household needs (drinking, watering livestock, watering gardens) and other needs. For a long time, on the banks of rivers, people organized celebrations, fist fights, and generally had fun after difficult working days.
And of course, under the influence of alcohol, during a fight, or simply when undressing to swim, people lost: coins, crosses, chains, rings and other valuables that we so persistently look for.
In winter, the river played the role of a transport route; various goods were transported along it by sleighs on ice downstream or upstream for exchange or sale to other villages, or to a large county town, if it was not far away.
They also organized mini-fairs, well, it is known where the goods are, there is money, coins were lost from “chilled” hands, fell out of the pocket along with the handkerchief taken out, etc. Such “lost pieces” fell on the snow-ice, and when the snow melted in the spring, they ended up on the river bottom. If it’s in shallow water, then you can get it, I’ll tell you how below.
First, let's look at promising search places.
- Gentle slope of the river bank;
- Shallow water, or the bottom of a river or lake;
- Sand, which is periodically washed up by a dredger from the bottom of a reservoir;
- Paths that go down to the river (you need to look for them, there are a lot of finds there);
- High river bank;
- Places where rivers merge, especially pay attention to the presence of a ditch or hill; discovering them is a great success.
All these places are the most valuable in terms of finding coins and other valuables of antiquity, and according to the statistics of treasure hunters, there are the most finds there.
To search for coins in the shallow waters of a river, you need to purchase a metal detector with a sealed coil (for example), such a coil is specially designed for searching in water, we examine shallow water, and do not forget about safety precautions.
Don’t pay attention to the fishermen sitting next to you or opposite, if they ask, answer that you lost the chain last year, there is no need to educate them about all the intricacies of the search, people are different.
Usually the river bank has sandy and clay soil, and as you know, coins are well preserved in this type of soil, so there are not very many “cocalics”.
To search at the bottom of rivers and lakes, one waterproof coil is not enough, and in general, put the metal detector aside, we need a “search magnet”. Buying it now is not a problem; it is not particularly expensive.
In any case, you will quickly pay for the magnet, especially if at the same time you hand over ferrous metal, which you will come across a lot during your search. There have been cases when gold and silver royal coins were retrieved from the bottom of rivers using a search magnet, so I think it’s worth a try, especially since searching on beaches and river banks is allowed by Mr. Putin’s new law.
The ancient water mills deserve special attention. But it is very difficult to look for them, I will talk about this in more detail in a future article, but now I will say that “water mills” were built in the narrowest place of the river, where the current is fast, and you need to look not for the mill itself (of course you need to find it first), but The final and long-awaited goal is the miller's house, where all payments for grinding were carried out.
This is where, according to treasure hunters' reports, deposits of small (mostly) coins are located. I've been looking for one mill for already three years, the village was simply huge and located on a vast territory, so the search area is very large, and so on, square by square, I hope I’ll find it soon.
It was not possible to calculate the river bed; it most likely changed directions many times.
As for treasures, I personally know the comrade who found a box with ten silver rubles of Catherine the Second in the reeds!!!
I think my advice, and in general the article, will help you at least a little in searching along the banks of rivers and lakes, and you will find your treasure, or several rarity coins. Good luck. Read our blog...
