Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| 10K Gold Ring Find |
Happy Mother's Day!
Here is a dry beach find. It looks like junk but is marked and was tested to be 10K. Looks like an older style to me. You can be fooled if you don't have items tested. The marks are generally correct, but some are marked incorrectly, sometimes being marked as gold when they are not.
Dry beach hunting isn't my favorite, but I'll do it at times. It can produce some good stuff. My best Rolex find and a lot of very high quality jewelry has come from the dry beach.
There are two important things to know about dry beaches. One is where the hot spots are, and the other is how to work areas that almost nobody else will.
Hot spots are not hard to figure out. One area that everybody knows about is the towel line. Being one of the more obvious areas, it is also one of the most worked.
I'll do a quick check of some of the obvious areas on a dry beach to determine if they have been worked much or not, then depending upon the results I might decide to move to either some of the less obvious spots or to some of the unworked hot spots that are almost never detected.
(I have heard from readers who made some very good finds as the result of the tips I gave some time back on volley ball courts.)
There are good areas on a dry beach that very very few people ever detect. Those are areas that will be protected by some type of obstacle. The obstacle might be layers of junk, other metal such as rebar in concrete or poles or beach chairs or something like that, or other things such as bushes or obstacles that make it difficult to get a detector coil into.
There are techniques for dealing with obstacles. I'm not quite ready to tell you all of those right now. Right now I'll just say there are ways to deal with them the obstacles that you find on dry beaches that will give you access to areas where heavily hunted beaches are seldom or ever hunted.
Here are a couple of photos of another very nice find by William M.
There is a lot of talk about target ID detectors. What can they really tell you? What most of them can tell you, I don't really care much about. I don't care if the thing tells me the signal is from a penny, nickel, dime or quarter. That just doesn't matter much to me.
If you are going to target clad coins, or other common targets, that might be of interest to you, but that is not what I am most concerned about.
Target ID might be useful if it told me the target was a Rolex watch, a silver cob, cannon ball, gold monstrance, or Civil War button. Then I might be interested. Fact is I'm going to find out anyway unless I'm really tired or out of time. And I'm not going to stand there and swing back and forth over a target trying to get a steady reading to figure it out. The type of items mentioned above aren't going to be correctly identified in any case and I can pretty much tell what I'm detecting from the audio signal for a lot of the more common items. What I prefer to do is use my brain to interpret the signal, and in the vast majority of cases, dig it no matter what it is.
I added a new poll to the blog to see what people have been finding during this slow beginning to 2014.
Unfortunately there is some data that I can not gather by using a Google blog poll. I'd like to hear what your least favorite detector of all time is, and what gave you a bad impression of that detector, and also what your favorite detector has been up until now and what you liked about it.
I know that some of the detectors that I have owned (two in particular) did not get a fair chance. My first detector was ordered out of a Sears Roebuck catalog. It got me started, but after a short while I sent it back. That was back in the day when I was counting coin finds. You have to go through the steps and stages of learning, and that is one of the common ones. My problem with that detector, whatever it was, I don't recall now, could have been and probably was my own fault.
One detector that I never liked was a Garrett PI. I had a few detectors before that one, but I sold it before long. The detectors that I had before that one were different from that one, and I didn't really understand the PI at first. If I had that detector today, I probably would not have any problem with it. It would probably find a place in my arsenal and be used for special situations.
One thing I didn't like about the PI at the time was how hot it was to things like bobby pins. I was accustomed to a detector that would null over iron, and I was digging a lot of modern gold back then. Another thing I didn't like about it was what seemed to me like a very erratic threshold tone. I was accustomed to a very steady threshold tone from my other detectors at the time. If I had the same PI detector today the threshold tone would not be much of a problem for me. I now am very familiar with detectors like that and know what to expect from them.
There are many situations when I do prefer to have ferrous/non-ferrous discrimination today. I still dig a lot of the iron, but in some situations not, depending upon a variety of factors.
When you get a new detector, your previous experience will determine to a large extent what your first impressions are towards your new detector. If you are accustomed to a rock solid threshold tone, for example, you might not like a detector that has a more erratic threshold tone. It might take a while to become accustomed to the features and operating characteristics of the new detector. In time you might find out that you like the new detector even better than the old detector even if you didn't like it at first. You might want to give it a chance.
On the Treasure Coast we still have that same old South/Southeast wind and poor detecting conditions. Too much sand. Tuesday or Wednesday at least we'll get a little more surf.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
