Ruining A Public Beach For Metal Detecting

We have this thing in Florida called beach "renourishment" that the powers-that-be seem to think is required every four or five years to keep soft sand under a tourists chair. It's been happening for a long time, since at least 1968 or earlier, where a special contractor comes in with an offshore dredge to suck tons of sea-bottom sand into humongous, horribly rusted, iron pipes, and spray it like an over-pressured lawn sprinkler all over the local beach. 

This can build up the sand from literally sea-level to almost 12-feet deep along a 15-mile stretch of Central Florida east coast, and literally puts targets more than out of reach as to make recoveries of previous days non-existent. On top of THAT, comes 3 or 4 months of the biggest bulldozers CAT makes, roaring up and down the public beach, spewing diesel fumes and leaving deep, oil-soaked tracks in the sand. 

As if THAT was not enough, the huge iron pipes from the offshore dredge scatters thousands, no, millions, of 1/4-inch to 1-inch ferrous fragments over 15-miles of beach and shallow water. This literally makes the coastal area dang near impossible to hunt. After a week in the wet sand and shallow ocean water, the fragments quickly develop an iron "aura" around them as the increasing rust causes a "deep rusted iron" effect by making the target react like silver or any other conductive signal of various values, so you cannot tune or discriminate them out. Today while detecting an effected beach, I ran into a guy using a like-new Minelab Excalibur, who was a pretty experienced beach detectorist, but was an out-of-town tourist going a a cruise to the Caribbean for the Thanksgiving holiday. He was complaining about how difficult it was to metal detect the beach with all the metal fragments, everywhere. The powers-that-be here in Florida always overlook the economic impact that being stupid about beach policies can bring, with the previous panic brought about by Florida Governor Rick Scott signing a law that lets water-front homeowners block off sections of the previously regularly-used-by-the-public beach; putting the public on the back burner over beach-use for the 9th time. I like to think there is no animosity toward practitioners of the metal detecting hobby by state and county officials, but a short conversation with a county employee makes me think otherwise. A little over a year ago, in late 2017, I was enjoying my solitude, swinging my coil over the wet sand on Cocoa Beach, when one of those stinky, gasoline-powered carts showed up carrying a smiling County guy. He says to me, over the lawn-mower whine of his giant roller-skate, "Enjoy metal detecting while you can...you got a week left before we cover this area with ten-feet of sand!" He waved evilly and departed in a cloud of powdered-sugar dust from the donut in his hand. I watched the guy vanish south down the beach, hoping a Great White would come bursting out of one of the rolling waves and yank the cart and passenger back to the depths, but apparently Great Whites are not as fond of powdered sugar as other monsters are...like Godzilla, or maybe Rodan...or....
Today, less than a year later, pens of restless bulldozers, and stacks of rusty iron pipes litter this same beach again. Some beach regulars, mostly surfers and a few fishermen, were obviously angry and yelling at the people inside the  dredging "compound" about their very unwelcome presence. The process screws up beach detecting, literally muddies the water for months and ruins fishing even longer. I'm off my soap-box now.