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Jimmy Buffett sang it best in his song Coastal denominations, which goes like this:
“I think on the beach
Where the seagulls preach-
This is where the Chinese buried the truth-
So, I dig in the sand… ”
Jimmy might as well have been singing about Bob Bitner – a beachcomber, sand digger and treasure hunter. I met Bob recently as he arrived at Olympic Beach with an armful of electronics and a hell of a story to tell.
Bob uses his lunch hours to scan – and “dig in the sand” – to seek and hope. You might as well tell you straight away that Bob and one of his sons unearthed a 140-year-old Spanish coin buried under the wooden stilts of the Edmonds ferry dock. More on that in a moment – yes – she’s a tease – and it’s all true.
The treasure bug bit Bob a few years ago. The family had moved into an old railroad house in Darrington. Every now and then they would find things tearing up old floors to remodel them; some old French and Italian coins and some old square nails. It made him wonder what could be in the dirt outside.
So Bob bought his first metal detector. “You know, it’s something I always wanted to do when I was a kid; you know, you watch Indiana Jones; you want to be that guy who finds the temple cursed and saves the day ”. Sorry – no Indiana Jones, but her first big find in the old house was this:
Bob unearthed the brass belt buckle of this Civil War Naval Union officer; buried under 6 inches of earth. He has no idea how it ended in Darrington.
In recent years, on his expeditions along the Sound, Bob has found a few silver and gold rings, an opal ring, coins, cans and bottle caps, old square nails – lots of nails – and even more garbage – which he makes bags and carts. Now – about this Spanish coin – the price of his collection.
Bob and his son ran the metal detector over the sand under the old wooden stilts of the Edmonds ferry. They had already dug up a handful of Kennedy 50-cent coins, when they got another hit; “It sounded very loud on the researcher,” Bob told me. When they found out the coin was so green from oxidation, Bob knew it wasn’t half a dollar. He said it took them half an hour to find it online – a Spanish coin, minted during the reign of King Alfonso XII – 1874-1886.
On one side, “you can still see the shield and the wheat,” said Bob, and on the other side “his neck and his nose; it’s just hard to believe that anything from 1877 or 1979 could be sitting here on the old stilts of Edmonds.
When he researched its value, Bob found “It’s not worth anything,” but added, “It’s not the whole point of that. I don’t care how much it’s worth, a million or nothing. The important thing, for Bob Bitner, it is that this beachcomber, dreamer, treasure hunter, discovered the happiness of unearthing history and bringing it back to life a little. If you want to hear great stories, you can often find it, at lunchtime, looking for what lies beneath our feet.
– By Bob Throndsen
So I’m sitting on a bench at Olympic Beach, enjoying the early fall sunshine, when a guy with an armful of electronics hit the beach. We started talking, and Bob Bitner had a whole story to share.
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