Recognizing Treasure - It Ain't As Simple As It Looks!

 Many times, treasure hunters may not always recognize treasure AS treasure. Now this sounds like some type of contradiction, but it's not. And this maxim forms the core of this afternoon adventure so many years ago. My friend Kevin Reilly and I were not only metal detecting pals, but also diving buddies. SCUBA diving and metal detecting was usually our MO when we were exploring and treasure hunting in mid-1980's south Florida, One of our treasure hunting targets had been a good-sized, cloudy water "lake" called Crystal Lake, in Pompano Beach, which was anything BUT crystal in your wildest imagination. There was an an old bare-barked tree leaning over the water on the south-side of the lake with a long, knotted rope dangling from one of the few remaining spindly branches. High school and college kids swing on this rope all day and every day during summer, doing the "cannonball" into the murky waters, 

We figured there should be a mound of class rings and gold chains under the impact point, and we were gonna make a killing on all that lost stuff! With our diving gear on, we waded slowly into the disgusting water, and dipped under the surface. If you thought the lake looked bad from the surface you were in for an an even more unpleasant surprise under the surface. Horrid stringy water plants rose up from the bottom, a nasty sewage-color, like mutated seaweed, you could not avoid it. Turning on our dive lights, the surrounding water was filled with plant debris and bits of organic particles, making it difficult to see much of anything. We descended deeper onto the plant-choked bottom, and tried to use our metal detectors among the close-spaced weeds, the coils hanging up on anything and everything. The few signals we got were submerged beer cans, pop-tabs and assorted car parts. We surfaced and Kevin frowned, with weeds hanging off his head and wrapped around his regulator. "We are not gonna find $#@! here in this sewer and I don't know why I let you talk me into this...there is nothing here!"

I nodded and said "Yea, not much here and yuck, what a mess in here!" We submerged again and headed back to the place we had come in, me shinning the light toward the bottom, about 10-feet down. A flash of yellow paint slowed me down a second as I played the light-beam along the bottom where I had seen the object. I signaled Kevin I was going deeper, and headed toward the object. The light revealed a sorry-looking Fort Lauderdale News/Sun Sentinel newspaper machine, dirty and weed covered. I moved the beam around the bottom and found two more machines, then a dozen, then even more. About 30 newspaper machines were lying in a heap on the bottom!

It looked like somebody broke open the coin-box on a bunch of them, then tossed em' in the lake to cover up the crime. We were about to surface and head back to the truck with an interesting story to tell, when I noticed a small plaque on the front of the machine that mentioned that there was a $50 reward for returning the machine to the newspaper!!!!!! Kevin and I grabbed a few lift-bags from the truck and brought up machines 4 or 5 at a time, With the truck bed full of dripping wet newspaper machines, we drove directly to the newspapers downtown office in Fort Lauderdale and true to the plaque, the good Sun Sentinel people handed us $1500 cash, in 50-dollar bills, on bill for each machine returned. We had made $750 each, in addition to an interesting story to tell. A much better turn of events, Lesson learned; treasure is not always easy to recognize, so look closely,