by Alan Sadwin

Alan and Sandy Sadwin live on Long Island, NY. They are avid beachcombers, defying the elements at times to sweep the south shore beaches near their home to find “buried treasure.” We salvagers have a saying that they recently came to adhere to: “No sense diving where there ain’t no shipwreck!”

The title of this article may give away the results of this trip (no emeralds, gold doubloons, or pieces of eight), but read on to hear about the wonderful 4-1/2 days Sandy and I spent at Vero Beach, Florida. After all, metal detecting should be fun, even if you don’t always find buried treasure.

It has been a few years since Sandy and I tried our hand at metal detecting on Florida’s Treasure Coast, and we started planning this trip in January. Our “treasure map” was the excellent Shipwrecks Near Wabasso Beach book by Bob “Frogfoot” Weller and Ernie “Seascribe” Richards, which lists 14 shipwrecks along the Treasure Coast. The book includes a brief history of each wreck and what treasure has been found, and it includes directions on how to find each wreck site. The directions include the distances to each wreck from Disney’s Vero Beach Resort, which happens to be where we were staying. It is required reading and daily reference for anybody planning a treasure hunting trip to Vero Beach.

We had hoped to arrive just after a major storm when there is a better chance for finding Spanish treasure. We managed to arrive in Florida just as Hurricane Noel was passing offshore on Thursday, 1 November and drove down from Orlando through sporadic downpours. After checking in, we headed straight to the beach. Unfortunately, we could only take one detector on that first day, as some dummy (me) had managed to pack his detector powered on and had drained the battery.

We decided to start at the Turtle Trail beach access which is the site of the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de la Regla, the capitana of the 1715 Fleet and one of the galleons which held a large amount of treasure. This is the location most people recommend for treasure hunting when in Vero, as gold, silver, and artifacts have all been found there. The surf was up and there was some erosion, but the locals who were checking out the beach when we arrived decided not to detect that day. One of the reasons is that the erosion was to sand that had been brought in to reclaim the beach after a hurricane passed through Vero a few years ago. We were told that the original beach was buried below 5 to 8 feet of new sand. The rain was torrential at times and we kept our DFX dry under a rain coat. The tide seemed to be higher than we expected, but we weren’t sure why. After 3-1/2 hours, we had found one quarter and called it a day.

Friday was sunny and the surf and wind were still up. According to the Salt Water Tides table I printed just before we left, low tide in Vero was about 1:00 PM so we slept until 7:00, ate breakfast and headed to the beach about 10:00 AM. It was a sunny day, but the surf remained very high. Our first stop Friday was just south of Sebastian Inlet and is a site identified as the “Pines Wreck” by Kip Wagner, one of the original Treasure Coast hunters. We decided not to hunt this site as it is on the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge. While the locals claim that detecting is allowed there, we felt that it was too close to the end of the turtle hatching season (31 October) to take a chance. We had noted that some turtles were still hatching, as evidenced by broken egg shells.

We then moved south to the Ambersands Parking and Beach Access and detected to the north until just before the McLarty Treasure Museum.

On the way we passed Kip Wagner’s cabin. Kip used to walk this very beach and skip flat rocks across the water. He later discovered that those flat rocks were, in fact, Spanish pieces of eight, and the era of treasure hunting in Florida began. I skipped a few rocks in Kip’s honor, but only after verifying that they weren’t Spanish silver. After 3-1/2 hours, we called it a day. The tide was still much higher than we expected and, in talking to a fellow detectorist (not a local), we determined that the tide charts we were using were way off and that low tide was actually at about 8:30 AM.

We then went shopping in Vero at our favorite book store. Unfortunately, we already had every treasure hunting book that they stocked. When we returned to the hotel, we used a hotel handout to confirm that low tide was in fact in the morning. That chart was also from Salt Water Tides. We still haven’t figured out why the drastic difference, but I am working the issue.

Saturday, low tide was at 9:30 AM and we were sure to be on the beach at 8:00 AM. It was easy because we just walked out of the hotel and onto the beach. The shipwreck of interest was the San Martín, the almiranta of the 1618 Honduran Fleet. 3-1/2 hours later we had a handful of modern change. Most coins were US clad coinage dated before 1994. There was even one “wheatie.” We did see a couple of detectorists who were not local. One was carrying a 2-foot long piece of 4” x 4” wood that looked to have been underwater for quite a long time. Of even more interest was the polished copper or bronze tack that was attached to it. Personally, I suspect it was a piece of a shipwreck and not a recent one at that. 

Sunday was our last day of metal detecting and we made the most of it. We were out 6 hours, but the result was the same. No gold, silver, or emeralds. We did meet a beachcomer who used to live in Freeport, NY. He showed us some fossilized shark teeth he had found on the beach and gave Sandy a few.

We ended our Vero Beach visit with a trip to the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, where we learned that most of the wreck sites that we detected north of the Disney Resort are, in fact, within the boundaries of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge.