From Larry Armstrong.
Taken from the Bergen Record:
Boston Tea Party relic believed found
Wednesday, November 17, 1999

By ROBIN ESTRIN The Associated Press

BOSTON -- An 18-inch piece of gold-coated wood raised from harbor muck may be a remnant of a tea chest colonists threw off a British ship during the Boston Tea Party, a treasure hunter believes.
Barry Clifford -- credited with finding the pirate ship Whydah in 1983 -- and two scuba divers located the piece last month at the spot where tea-carrying vessels were pillaged more than 200 years ago in a revolt that fueled the American Revolution.
At low tide on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, angry colonists chopped up 342 chests of tea and hurled them into the water to protest British taxes. Authenticated artifacts from the "tea party" are rare.
"This would be a wonderful find if it is authenticated and it is found to be a part of the Boston Tea Party, because it was really the spark that ignited the entire Revolution," said Don Knuuttila, general manager of the Boston Tea Party Museum.
Clifford is keeping the piece of wood in a vat of cool, deionized water to prevent corrosion until he can authenticate it.
If the wood is what Clifford believes it is, chances are there are more artifacts still down in the harbor muck, Knuuttila said.

Please. You can give me any circuit of metal detector to build. And in what site I can see circuits ( in special PI)????
Thank you
Carlos
cfidel@arnet.com. ar

Just a quick mail to say Thank You. I got out of bed this afternoon ( Im not lazy Im night shift this week ) to find my FID membership had arrived. I only posted it to you on Saturday and I didn't expect it to arrive for a least a week, that`s great service. I was expecting to find my membership card and a welcome letter. I was very surprised to find all the other documents. They all make great reading and what a great idea the free recovery card is, I will definitely print a few more out and use them, its a great idea to get known in the local area and can only improve peoples opinions on detecting. All the info on the Treasure Act is also very useful. I am new to detecting and I found it all need to know stuff. This all goes to show me that you are a very professional outfit and you really do care about our hobby. I will not hesitate to promote and recommend membership of FID to everyone. If there is ever anything I can do to help you and / or the FID in my area please get in touch.
Paul Egan.

Hi you all over the pond,
Thought your readers would like to see this,
Yours,
Larry Armstrong

From the Bangor Daily News: Finding history with eels, mud and bogeyman By Tom Weber, NEWS Columnist Resurrecting the scattered pieces of the past, even those as alluring as the remnants of ships lost in the American Revolution, hardly resembles the TV documentaries of treasure hunters hauling glittering jewels and gold bars from the bottom of the sea. It tends instead to be careful, plodding work that begins with meetings of historians and civic leaders who talk strategy, funding, documentation, governmental jurisdiction - pretty dry, unromantic stuff, to be sure, but critical to the archaeological process. Such was the case this week when 60 or so people met in Bangor to discuss the first stage of locating and mapping the remains of the doomed American naval fleet chased by the British in the Penobscot River in 1779. Called the Penobscot Expedition, it was one of the worst military disasters in U.S. history, a strategic blunder that ended when about 40 ships were sunk by the British fleet or scuttled by their own desperate crews. Experts believe that about 10 of those wrecks lie at the bottom of the Penobscot, between Bangor and Brewer. Yet actually bringing the artifacts to the surface for all to see, they caution, is a complicated endeavor that could take a few years. For Peter Bell, however, the evidence of those legendary ships is not confined just to the pages of history books. As an amateur scuba diver, he is one of the few to have visited the historic hulks in the nearly impenetrable darkness of the river. With his hands he has traced the outlines of their huge, squared timbers, and with his imagination he has reassembled the once-sturdy warships from the jumble of centuries-old wood. "Diving on a site is like opening a vault,'' said Bell, a computer technician from Hermon and one of a handful of divers at Monday's planning session. Bell started diving as a hobby in 1980, mostly exploring World War II ships off the coast of his native New Jersey. When he moved to Maine in 1986, he combined his interests in diving and history and headed for the Penobscot River. "I'd known about the Penobscot Expedition since my school days, and here was the scene of it, practically in my own back yard,'' he said. "I wanted to find the site of the Warren, the flagship of the Continental fleet.'' His research led him to Winterport, and an old cellar hole believed to have been the site of a house built by the Warren's medical officer, John Le Baron. After Le Baron fled his sinking vessel, Bell said, he settled in Winterport and became the town's first doctor. The death of the doctor's fiancee is marked by a small gravestone at the site, which reads: "Jane P. Goodwin, consort of Dr. John Le Baron.'' Bell, guessing that the doctor might have made his home close to where his ship went down, then took his research underwater. "It was like diving in pea soup - black pea soup,'' he said. "I had a couple of high-powered lights, but it was creepy down there, with the mud and the eels. It was like diving with the bogeyman.'' His first dive turned up nothing. The next day, however, he found a large timber on the bottom, then another. In subsequent dives, he strung lines from one timber to the next, eventually weaving them all in a loose, gridlike interpretation of a hull he believes is the Warren's. "A lot of people think you just go down and see a hull on the bottom, but that's not the way it is,'' said Bell. "The hulls have been scoured by ice and stuff, and cut in half and collapsed, so to most people they would look like piles of timber.'' Bell had already explored a couple of other local sites from the 1779 fleet when Warren Riess, a marine archaeologist from the University of Maine's Darling Center, arrived in 1992 with a U.S. Navy team to find the flagship vessel. "I told them I knew where the Warren was, but they didn't believe me at first,'' Bell said with a shrug. "So they spent the $50,000 Navy grant towing the sonar up and down and right by the Warren. At the end of the summer, they came and asked me to take them to site. And when they dove on it, they were like kids in a candy store.'' Like fellow diver Brent Phinney of Brewer, who has been busily exploring a wreck site of his own recently, Bell has continued to dive in the inky blackness in search of history. He said he now knows of three other ship sites in the river, although he would prefer to keep that information to himself for a while. In the meantime, he hopes the ambitious new mapping venture that was kicked off this week really does get off the ground and into the water one day. If it does, Bell would like to be right down there in the creepy depths of it all, with the mud and the eels and the bogeyman for company. "It's like a window on the beginnings of this country,'' he said. "Not everyone gets the chance to physically put their hands on something so important. Being down there really makes American history come to life.''

Dear Colin,

This has been a pet project of mine since the end of 1997 that has finally, after many headaches, come to fruition. You may remember that about the middle of last year I sent messages around the net regarding software that was then known as Eureka. A few things have changed since that message, not least of which was going it alone rather than with a partnership as was originally intended.
I feel that software dedicated to the Metal detectorist has been a long time in coming and this program is just the start of many ideas I have for EarthWorks. I have a long list that will be incorporated into the next version, if I get the support from the Metal Detecting community such as, multiple images for each record.
Mail merge the details from any screen into ViText. These two are minor updates that will be incorporated free of charge. There are many more major updates(21 to be precise and also f.o.c. for the first year) that I know will make EarthWorks the premier Metal Detecting software around. Why use EarthWorks when I could use any other database or even spreadsheet style program?
This question is valid, as almost every program I have seen on the Internet is basically a spreadsheet of information. Now there is nothing wrong with that but if you can log your finds that way, why pay out for a 'specialised' piece of software? EarthWorks goes that one step further. It allows you to plot your finds onto any map or photograph etc of your site. This plot is not just a dead image but a link into your finds database. You can at a later date move your mouse over your map, photograph etc and as you pass over each plot a popup window appears telling you what the find was. If you then click on that plot the finds database is opened at the relevant record. You can have as many sites as you wish, there is no limit and each site's map, photograph etc stores its own links into your database. So now you can visually see where you found that coin. You can visually navigate your finds.
There are many other features within EarthWorks that I am sure Metal detectorists everywhere would love to use…… there are many others that I hope to give to you. I am a Metal Detectorist who has looked for such software for the past few years but could not find anything that had what I needed it to do.
Therefore EarthWorks is now born.Our website

Mike Ross
Proprietor