Pastimes

Treasure Island

Beachombing for Booty at Crown Beach

    I didn’t set out to break the law when I took my 8-year-old son to Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach to scavenge for treasure with the metal detector he got right after Christmas.
    Jack couldn’t wait to try out his new gadget, one of those smart-looking toys put out by the National Geographic Society that we picked up at Target for $15. I was working on an article about beachcombing, and it seemed like a fun thing to do on a nice afternoon in January.
    Besides, Jack, whom we call “the banker” in our family, is always hunting for treasure. He’s the one digging through the couch cushions, looking for change. He roots through drawers, looking for pennies, and is the first to spot a stray quarter on the floor of the car. Last year, he spent his Christmas money on a coin-sorting machine.
    The metal detector was just the ticket for him to expand his search for coins, lost keys and other treasure. He could scout out the whole beach with it.
    At the beach, the device started beeping within two minutes of us setting foot in the sand. We started digging, with our hands, but there was nothing. Hmmm. We moved onto to another spot and then silence.
Over a particularly dark patch of sand, the metal detector went wild. We dug and dug. A family on the beach came over to see what we found. Nothing.
    “Well,” Jack said. “There’s nothing here.”
    We went home, and the metal detector went in the closet, which is probably a good thing, since I’m not legally supposed to use it. Turns out, you need a permit to use a metal detector on the beach in Alameda or anywhere in the East Bay. And, if you find anything worth more than $50, you’re supposed to turn it in to the East Bay Regional Park District. This isn’t a new law; the $35 permit, good for five years, has been required for 20 years or so, according to Anne Rockwell, park supervisor of Crown Beach.
So, why regulate beach combing?
    “We don’t want people digging up holes all over the beach,” says Rockwell, pointing out that picnic areas are another hot spot for people with metal detectors.
    To be sure, treasure has been found on the beach in Alameda, although the big finds are probably kept secret. No one has turned in anything thought to be worth more than $50, Rockwell says.
    In the past dozen years, a couple of high school class rings were turned in, probably because the treasure hunters knew they had sentimental value. One ring was from the Sacramento area, from the late 1960s, and the finder was able to identify the school, which, in turn, was able to locate the person to whom the ring belonged.
    Casual beachcombers find a variety of stuff on Alameda’s shores: a pink slipper, size 8; lots of tiny seashells; a wine corkscrew; a blue comb; a little trash, but not too much, surprisingly. Sometimes you’ll notice big pieces of a pier or whole trees lying on the beach. According to Rockwell, they wash down to Alameda from the Delta area, along waterways between Sacramento and San Francisco.
    In spring every year, rays and small leopard sharks wash up on Crown Beach. “We’ll often see quite a few of them die off, and it’s kind of a natural phenomena,” says Rockwell. In winter, the storms and very high tides often wash sea debris onto the shore.
    A woman I met on the beach recalled that as a child, she would grab the washed-up sharks and swing them over her head before throwing them back into the bay, a game of sorts for her and her friends.
“We had a gray whale a few years ago,” Rockwell says. “It was about 25 feet. A female gray whale; quite dead and very stinky.”
    The guys with the metal detectors aren’t looking for sea creatures, however. According to Rockwell, they come and go with the tide, showing up regularly when the tide is low to scavenge for treasure.
    “People actually go into the water with the metal detectors,” she says. “There’s so much detail [the devices] give you these days. They even have a button on them that tells you if something is silver, nickel or gold. Some of these guys are here on a pretty regular basis.”
    They’re kind of a secretive society, the guys with metal detectors. Maybe it’s because they’re on a serious hunt for treasure. And maybe they’ve found it here, in Alameda, of all places, and don’t want to share the booty.
    Tracking them down is difficult. On nice, warm days when the tide went way, way out, so far that it looked like I could walk halfway across San Francisco Bay, I headed to the beach and scanned it for some sign of treasure hunting. Most days, it was me and the seagulls.
    One man I talked to said all he ever found were “some coins and jewelry, nothing big.” He didn’t give me his name.
    There are about a dozen regulars who show up with their metal detectors on the beach in Alameda, Rockwell says. Almost all are slightly older men. They’re part of a group, she says, that tours a circuit of beachy spots in the Bay Area.
    They come out beachcombing after big holidays, like Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day, thinking, perhaps, that someone may have lost a bracelet or maybe a pocketful of quarters.
Sometimes they’ll help look for something. There have been several cases when distraught visitors to Crown Beach have come to Rockwell for help finding a lost wedding ring in the sand. She always refers the visitors to the guys with the metal detectors, who’ll usually mount a search—for a price.
    It could be that there are only quarters, keys and beached sharks to be found in Alameda’s sands. But then again, maybe there’s a pirate’s booty just off shore. You never know. Makes you glad you got a permit for the metal detector that’s sitting in the closet.