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Friday, February 23, 2007

Pirate Booty



Tampa Florida 76 degrees, on the beach with a metal detector, ok, my life is complete. Well, for now at least.

Bill Jackson's Adventurer in Tampa was thee place to be as far as getting a detector to rent. A mini instruction, a warning not to take it to Fort Desoto Beach because it is a national park, a suggestion of where to find some awesome public beaches and it was treasure hunting time.

I kid you not, two feet onto the beach and the dang thing was beeping. A nickle, woo-hoo, that find just reduced the $35 dollar rental fee down to $34.95. I am hooked.

I know you want to get to the details of the booty haul so check out the photo as you read below.

After the nickle, there were two BudLite beer bottle tops. Not to be out shined, came the coveted Corona cap. A burnt sparkler, a screw, two pop can pull tabs, whoa, I was on a roll. There is half a pair of sunglasses, a couple pieces of unknown wire, a Budweiser can and a some tin. The rusted hook was probably buried the deepest.

And then I heard it, the detector was beeping and the indicator was showing something BIG. As it was becoming more visible, I just knew it was a bomb head. A cylinder, rounded on one end, flat on the other, yep, it was looking like a bomb and if care wasn't taken, it was sure to explode. I carefully lifted it out of the hole, scooped the sand out of this hollow casing and reconsidered. Maybe it wasn't a bomb head after all, maybe it was the top to an acetylene tank or gas tank. But for those few minutes of digging, it was fun to speculate what the heck this thing was.




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. Ok, the pseudo-missile looks like it could be some type of ancient Martian head gear. It also reminds me of a piece of mystery metal my college room mate used to keep on our mantel - she had a collection of UPOs - Unidentified Phallic Objects - including a rather unusually shaped Cypress knee. The metal piece in this collection was cylindrical, about 8 inches long, opened on one end and enclosed and rounded on the other. We referred to it as the ultimate prophalactic. I think it was actually a drain trap from the chem lab.

Michael said...

In Europe it's really common to dig up bombs when an excavation starts. Last fall, in fact, during road construction not very far from where I live, a road worker died when he drove over a bomb from World War II. Might want to hold off on metal detecting when you come to Europe!