Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
I will be doing a post or a series of post on Treasure Coast finds and major trends and conclusions. I don't know yet how many posts it will involve, but probably more than one. I might even get started on that today.
I just received a post from SuperRick who besides visiting the Treasure Coast every once in a while does a lot of hunting for gold nuggets and meteorites out west. Here is an email I just got from Rick.
I don't know if you remember it or not but I sold the same detector that you use because it would not read meteorites but was great for gold and deep targets! I bought it when it first hit the market and tried everything I could think of to get it to read common meteorites and it just wouldn't do it and weighing in at 6 1/2 pounds didn't help out here in the desert!
The one thing that most guys miss is you have to spend time with any detector that you use. What should be a love affair turns out to be a nightmare for some guys because they don't understand their machine or don't know the proper way to detect with any metal detector!
Their swing is always way off of the ground and when they are coming to the end of it the detector swings up into the air even higher! So far I had two bad experiences with two different detectors that I bought for meteorites. The first one the factor took it back after I worked with them for a few months. I sent them videos of how we were setting it up and it wouldn't even read gold nuggets doing air test with the way they were telling me to set it up!
I want to thank you once again for all that you do with your Blog, your the best out there when it comes to the Fla. beaches and the history of the shipwrecks!
I hope that you have happy holidays and good health in the next new year!
Rick
Thanks Rick! You mention a lot of very important points.
I'm going to expand on a couple of things Rick referred to.
First, different detectors are good for different things. A detector that might be great for one type of hunting, might be an absolute waste for another. Rick mentions one detector that he found to be very good for certain types of targets but poor for meteorites. Florida guys don't think much about hunting meteorites. Florida is just not the place to do that.
Second, it can take a lot of time to master a metal detector - some more than others. In the past I've spent a lot of time talking about experimenting and testing with whatever detector you are going to use.
Third, I often see some very poor technique being used on the beaches. I usually assume that the user is a beginner, but I saw one fellow recently that I don't think was a beginner. I almost said something, but decided I wouldn't. It was not cheap "beginner's" detector either. It was a high end metal detector, but it was being used in a way that would make it impossible to detect a lot of good targets. I thought maybe the fellow was backing the coil off for some specific reason. If you don't want to detect small or normal size targets or something, you can lift your coil off the ground higher than normal. The fellow had the coil nearly a foot off the ground, and like Rick said, was lifting it even higher at the end of the swing.
You can miss a lot of targets at the end of a swing by lifting the coil or changing direction too quickly. Jerking the coil at the end of the swing can cause false signals, which can mask real signals. The same goes for lifting the coil at the end of the swing.
You may or may not realize how high your coil is from the ground, but it is worth checking to make sure that it is near the ground. There were some people years back that used to "scrub." Scrubbing refers to actually having your coil in contact with the ground. I haven't seen anyone doing that for a long time. You can't do it with all detectors anyhow, and you might need a coil cover.
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Yesterday when I was talking about detectors that years ago showed target images, I was not talking about some of the more recent detectors like the CTX 3030.
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I'll introduce what might become a series of posts today. The series, if that is what it actually turns out to be, will be called Treasure Coast Finds: Major Trends and Conclusions.
The series will be about old treasure finds going back to the mid 1900s up to today. While thinking about the history of treasure hunting on the Treasure Coast, I realized that there are some definite trends over the past several decades and some general conclusions that can be reached. At least it appears that way to me. Maybe you will not agree with everything. In that case feel free to let me know.
I'll consider discoveries made from the post - World War II era up to the present. After the war there were a bunch of developments that came together to facilitate treasure hunting on the Treasure Coast.
There were young, healthy skilled, adventurous trained men coming out of the war ready to begin new lives. Some were trained right here along the Treasure Coast.
Technologies developed during the war were also helpful. Magnetometers and mine detectors developed for the military were used to find treasure on the Treasure Coast. SCUBA technology was developed around that time too.
The products of military research and development often have peacetime applications. A couple of days ago I referred to the development of "swarm" drone technology being used by the military, and as you know, underwater remote control devices are being used for deep sea treasure hunting. Military research and technology is often on the leading edge. That is why I referred to it in a post the other day.
WW II technology will not be my topic for the proposed series, but the series will consdier the post - WW II era. I think I might get started on that tomorrow or sometime soon.
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Still eagerly awaiting the predicted increase in surf this weekend. We had some nice low tides lately.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
