The Golden Olde

Here today and gone tomorrow

Todays article has two meanings. The first point is that for some time I have observed clues about the raising water levels and sand erosion that have made me conclude that the beaches as we know them are going to fade into history in an alarming short time. I have been telling my friends that I thought in only 50 to 75 years that America(and the world for that matter) would have no more sandy beaches. How sad, but global changes are not turned around in a short time and I see nothing that would stop it. Please don't throw me in with the environmental activist group and the global warming theory because, unlike them I see no alternative and running up the cost of our gasoline or shutting down our factories would just increase our suffering without reason.
This old earth has been abused all right but the enemy has been our ignorance and no army of PHD's will find a way out of the resultant effects. From my personal experience I will tell you what I have seen with my own eyes as I have lived in this area all my life. First the saltwater lake that is fed by the bay near me was only a shallow two or three feet deep much of the time when I was young and there was a fresh water creek which fed into it and a bridge that crossed the creek as it neared the lake. My parents fished under that old bridge and as a child I remember the sound of cars going over it about 25 feet or more over my head.
As I look at the bridge today it is being replaced because high water laps at the bottom of it on a high tide and a storm would close it as an evacuation route. The engineers have made a sad mistake however and elevated it only a few feet. How no one that I talked to about this would even believe me at work and it was so easy for them to pass off my observations as simply unbelievable. All the educated people were told it was only subsidence and nothing to worry about as the area was tapped for gas and oil in the early days and some sinking was normal.
When I was a child (before WWII) the only thing our family did for fun was go to the beach at Galveston. This was west beach and it was a beautiful thing to behold. The beach was several hundred yards wide and the dunes were large. Storms had thrown up huge trees on the beach and folks could drive down to a virgin beach where you would not see anyone for miles and use the tree limbs to make a fire a cook a fine dinner of boiled shrimp or fried fish.
West beach as I see it today is not even recognizable as the seawall road that ended and permitted cars to drive down the long beach is closed and only the sea fills the old image of the wide expanse of beach. Farther down there are strips of sand beach here and there but not even in your wildest dreams could you imagine that this is all that remains of the beautiful white sand beach.
Farther back than this in the Civil war there was a camp on Virginia point which is the point where the only road from the mainland crossed to the island. The camp has been under water for much of my life and they had built a concrete vat to hold water at the camp and years ago some folks told me that at low tide you could still see it out there in the water but it is gone forever now.
Sure, I read the trash that NOAA and the rest put out about sea levels and temperatures but I know beyond their information that they are wrong. It is not only happening around here but there are towns that I read about everywhere that are having their beaches replenished by dredging up sand from the water and pumping it onto the beaches. They have done this at Galveston, Texas city, and currently Bolivar peninsula and all their efforts are only a like candle in a storm for all the good it will do.
Strangely enough I did not sit down at the computer to write about this today but it just came out anyway. Sorry 'bout that.
Point two is about the strange way that gold jewelry will show up one day on the beach and the very next day cannot be found by anyone! Anyone who has hunted beaches for long will understand this and I know it happens but can not explain it very well. The day before yesterday my wife and I hunted the low tide beach after a cool front had passed and the weather was delightful and cool and you could begin to see where the winter cuts would show up later although they were only inches deep now.

The picture above shows the nice bunch of rings that we found Monday morning at the beach. I have explained how the sand is stripped off the beaches but this cold front was mild and the sea was as calm as I have ever seen it. The gold nugget ring was 12 inches deep and recovered with a Fisher CZ7 detector.
Tuesday morning we hunted hard up and down the beaches and struck out miserably as well as everyone else that we ran into hunting the beach. We had even installed a larger coil on the CZ7 to reach down a couple of inches deeper where we had hoped to find more gold sleeping in the sand but nothing was found.
I had placed nails in the posts on several beaches to tell me how much sand had been removed but surprisingly I got mixed results. One beach has eroded 23 inches since August while another only a half mile down has not eroded any!
There are rock groins placed several hundred yards apart down the beach and erosion depends on which side is eroded because of the currents. The funny thing is that one day you can find things like the four rings we found and $7.56 in coins but the very next morning there was nothing to be found including coins. All I can say to that is go often and hope that today is THE day!
If I can discover why it acts like this I will be quick to write about it but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.