Hark the Herald Island

After being enjoyably sidelined with my daughters heading off to America party, my wife moving house, extreme shopping with my sister and hanging out with my Dad I was hoping for a good weekends detecting. But on Saturday I awoke with the start of a severe two day attack of gout in my right foot. So even with a limp I was keen this afternoon to finally able to get out amongst it again.

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The chosen venue was Herald Island, a small island situated behind the Whenuapai airbase, which we only decided on once we were on the road. Even with no research on possible sites there, it seemed a nice random place to go to anyway. It is reached by a tarmac causeway and we arrived in the late afternoon, with the sun still blazing hot.

We started off having a sniff around the wharf at the far end of the Island. I have been fishing with the kids off of this wharf over the years, without too much success. I was hoping to have a better strike rate under the wharf than I had on top of it. We pottered around for half an hour but it really was heavily trashed. Gareth, my partner in crime today, managed to pluck a solitary10 cent piece but the tear tabs and bottle tops poliferated the area and it is the most rubbish infested place we have yet visited. I found a mini screwdriver (Yay, but seem to have thrown it with the trash, boo), but we both soon tired of scraping up rubbish and we moved on. It was fairly easy to climb down under the wharf but with my gout still a bit tender getting back up was not as elementry. It's a bugger getting old. Soon, after checking the cricket score (NZ well in control v England), we were off to find a park we knew must exist somewhere on the island. The next bay, with the name Christmas Beach provided just that, a medium sized park adjacent to the beach. Still pickings were slim. Gareth pulled out a $1.10 and I managed 60 cents. 

I slipped down on to the little piece of beach that the tide had yet to reclaim and apart from finding a small spanner and a small buckle, all the targets were hot rocks and bottle tops.  (UPDATE : The spanner is not just 'a small spanner', it is a purpose built spanner made to change rivet heads on a rivet tool. Thanks to Ritchie for identifying this special fact. :) 

The buckle is just a cheap buckle.

The nice clean sand on this festive named beach and the shallow bedrock tempts a further visit when the tides are in our favour. All finds on this beach were less than three inches.



Special spanner, buck all and spending.

So after a few days away from detecting we were happy to be back out. The lack of real success did not dampen our enthusiasm and a bit of local knowledge imparted by a resident as we were leaving gave us an indication of where to search next time. Two ships were apparently scuttled somewhere off of Christmas beach in times past and occasionally relics such as large copper nails and brass fuglies get washed ashore. So we have now definately added Xmas beach to an increasingly long list of future visits.

See you out there.