Wednesday 20 June 2012

One week of Holiday in RAROTONGA part#1 -Photos

Good day everyone ,
I know some of you are waiting impatiently for my story about my trip to Raro.
We stayed for a week at Manea beach villas (Muri Lagoon) , where i was cleaning the area apposite one of the hotels.
My research paid off - noone ever detected the area. I was doing about 3 hours a day . Detecting while snorkeling. And. OH MAN! there were so many targets! you would not believe!
I think i was able o cover only 0.001% of the area with targets. I also had a big help from the current - it was really strong with tide coming - dragging all light items  into dead spot. - so i had a very limited ammount of crap/light  targets like pull tabs.

Area of detecting is between main shore and an atoll :

the depth is as seen above- waist deep during low tide and goes up 0.5m during high tide - so i could detect any time regardless of the tide.I did take my Sandscoop with my- but abandoned it the first day.
The reason for that is that all items go into reef  "pores" and stay there. so in order to retrieve the item- i had to "wave away" all sand from the spot with a hand and then try to extract the item  (i will have all that in the video in PART#2 once i compile all the episodes):

Here what it looks like after removing sand and trying to get an item out (this one was filmed by my partner where i actually abandoned 10c coin after 5 minutes - couldn't get it out)


I know people do not like to read a long long stories. so this post will be pretty short :-)
My total finds were about 350coins (the below picture doesnt have all of them as it was made only half way through)



Brakedown as following :

Cook Island coins:
5$ * 12
2$* 19
1$*22
---
50C*7
20C*10
10C*12
5C*4
Total 120$ spendable
NZ coins:

2$*39
1$*52
50C*28
20C*50
10C*35
5C*24
2C*14
1C*7

Total 130$ spendable
1 Penny 192
2 Florins 1949/1964
+some AU dollars etc....

Total Rings were about 15 at the end of the trip, But main finds are as below:



Top are 5 Silver Rings
Middle is 4 9CT gold rings (last with small diamonds)
and last ring is a copper wedding ring :-( all other rings were junk :-(
The total weight of rings is just over 20 gram, that makes it about 500$ scrap value.
I've realized that Raro is a holiday destination for NZ tourists. and we all know that New Zealanders do not wear much gold and all wedding rings are usually 9 CT :-(


I've also cleaned the lagoon from a lot of rubbish and dropped a big bag of it at MURI LAGOON ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER - where guys made a picture of me and promised to write in newspaper and online- should get a link later on.

Final Picture of a lagoon cleaner :





STAY TUNED for a Video Post!

2 comments:

  1. What a great week you 2 must have had.
    Congrats on the gold.
    Now the video. Dadada daaar!

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  2. Great trip Max well worth the effort will be sure to re visit Raro with some better equipment. well done on the finds, I can hear the Gold Coast calling you guys for a bit of exploration..

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