I frequently get asked what happens if I get my magnet stuck and can’t pull it out - well this is what I did after I plus 3 passers by couldn’t pull it out.

I ended up driving my car down the harbour wall and attached my rope to the towhook. A conveniently placed mooring post made it so I could wrap it round and pull the magnet pretty much perpendicular to the harbour wall.

I had an interesting find that I definitely wasn’t expecting; a fossilised tooth from what I think was a prehistoric marine reptile, not magnetic but fell off when I was removing chunks of metal from the magnet:

And here is the pile of scrap metal I ended up with:

This was a very good location, every single cast brought up multiple bits of metal, and I never moved from the first spot I stopped at along the harbour wall. I suspect I could go back thousands of times and still pull loads out.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    And here I thought you’d pulled up a Skoda and I was going to ask if you threw it back. 😜

    I had an interesting find that I definitely wasn’t expecting; a fossilised tooth from what I think was a prehistoric marine reptile,

    That’s fascinating - got other photos of it from different angles? It doesn’t look that tooth like to me. However, I do have a few fossil teeth and they vary wildly based on function so I can’t be sure (I also didn’t continue Paleontology into the vertebrates).

    • ScreamingFirehawk@feddit.ukOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The only thing I threw back in was a crab that tried to fight me while I was trying to return it to its home 😆 I did think that the picture might raise some questions without the explanation.

      My partner thinks that the ridges down one side are denticles. Google lens does return some similar looking teeth, but neither of us know much about fossils beyond what we learned in the fossil museum in Lyme Regis.