Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.BlogSpot.com.
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| Single-Day Finds By Leonard G. Photo by Leonard. |
Leonard found these items on Sunday morning. Way to go Leonard! Great jewelry to coin ratio.
Not only did he find some ear rings, but a matching pair. That doesn't happen real often.
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If you want to get the maximum value out of your beach hunts, you might want to hunt where there is a good jewelry to coin ratio. To give just one simple general example, the jewelry to coin ratio is higher in the water than on the beach.
Concentrations of coins can help point you to jewelry, but the best jewelry spots do not always have a lot of coins. There ate times and places where you'll find a nice high jewelry to coin ratio.
One extreme and unusual example is a muddy spot along the road in the Keys where people tend to stop and wade. It isn't a nice beach and isn't heavily visited, but every time I detected there I found a gold ring but seldom a single coin. People wander out into the shallow water and in a few yards find that it is actually more like mud. Any hand or foot with a ring on it that is put into the mud will come out without the ring. The suction will pull it right off.
Another beach where I used to detect was more typical. It was your usual sandy Florida beach, but it was spread out over a huge area. It also had a very high jewelry to coin ratio for some reason. You'd spend an hour or two and typically come out with one piece of jewelry and maybe two or three coins.
You have to know those places. At a place like that a lot of people would spend a little time detecting, not find many targets and quit too soon.
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One thing that I've really come to appreciate in recent years is the benefit of using test targets. I know I've talked about that some before, but my appreciation of test targets continues to increase, even after all these many years.
I happened to notice the other day where another blog linked to one of my posts about test targets. After reading the article, the author of the blog concluded that it was indeed a good idea to carry a test target. The linked post was the one where I was talking about how I used a test target in the field to check my tuning. In the post I talked about how one day I noticed that my detector's response seemed less than what I would have expected on a particular target. I then put the test target down and tested the detector on the test target. I knew about what type of signal I should get with that particular test target. As with the other target, the response wasn't as strong as I expected. That verified that my detector was not tuned optimally and might need to be retuned. The test target provided a quick and easy test, and since I knew how my detector typically responded to that carefully selected target, it also provided an accurate test. After retuning with the test target, I go much better performance.
One key is to use a relevant test target, such as a small gold ring if that is the kind of thing you are targeting.
I can remember times way back in the days not long after I began detecting when my settings were way off and it took me a long time to find that out On one occasion my settings looked right. I put the knobs where I usually had them and everything looked right, but I later learned that somehow the settings were off. Just as an example, lets say the sensitivity setting was at 10, but the detector was acting more like it was at 5. I hate to think how long it might have been before I learned that. If I had done what I do now, I would have checked with the test target to at the beginning of each hunt and quickly found out if the settings were off.
Things do go wrong with detector's at times, and it is good to quickly discover when that happens.
Even when everything is working well, you can still benefit from retuning or ground balancing from time to time. A test target can help you discover that and help you assess the impact.
I frequently do a check with a relevant known test target in the field to verify that I have close to the optimal settings. Some detectors benefit from it more than others, but even with a simple turn and go detector, using a test target can quickly show you if everything is all right or not. No need to waste time detecting an hour or two before finding out. Verify first.
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The water has been very clear in Lake Michigan. Here are some nice views of unidentified wrecks.
http://xfinity.comcast.net/video/ice-reveals-shipwrecks-in-lake-michigan/430995011645/Comcast/Weather_Channel_newest?cid=hero_sf_shipwrecks
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On the Treasure Coast we still have very smooth seas and good negative tides.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@Comcast.net
