Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
I've repeatedly written that the most important determinant of success with beach metal detecting, or probably any kind of metal detecting, is the amount of time you spend doing it. That might seem obvious enough, but what might not be so obvious is all the reasons that is true.
The more time you spend detecting, the more likely it is that you'll continue to learn and improve. Learning isn't automatic though. You have more opportunity for learning, but it is possible to avoid it. You must continue to experiment and explore instead of thinking that there is nothing more to learn. For example, if you turn on your detector and adjust the settings the same way every time without giving it any thought or consideration, you probably won't learn much about how to tune your detector more effectively. Different situations, environments and targets require adjustments, and if you don't adjust, you'll undoubtedly be using your detector somewhat less than optimally. Much of the time you won't need that last little bit of power or sensitivity. In fact sometimes you might want to tune it down. You can get along and perhaps do quite well using the same settings, if they are decent settings to begin with, but you won't learn much more about it if you don't keep working at it.
Another thing that will happen as you spend more time is that you will learn to read the beach better. Again, it isn't automatic. You will want to watch what the beach looks like, what you find, and correlate the two.
And just by spending more time, you will make additional finds. Again, that seems obvious enough, but every find can tell you something new.
Here is the big one and the one I really wanted to discuss today. If you are out there a lot, you will be able to carefully monitor the different areas of the beach and be there to notice any new hot spot that opens up. That is the big advantage.
Down south I had thirty or so spots along just a few miles of beach. Each one was different in some way. Each one was typically only ten or twenty yards long. There were also areas in between those spots that I didn't bother with much for one reason or another.
When I went south, I'd often take a quick glance at the different areas along the way, and the same thing when I went north. I would watch to see if they were "hot" or not or in the process of changing - sometimes just doing a visual check and other times doing a quick check with a detector.
Each spot was different. They produced different kinds of things and things from different eras or ages. They would open up at different times because of their location and makeup. I had a grade for each of those spots, however the temperature of each spot would change frequently. One might open up and produce heavily for a day, week, or month, and then close up again. Finding the hot ones when they were hot was the most important factor. Then I worked that spot until it changed or was starting to fizzle out. But I had to be out there to keep track of the temperature of the different spots.
To give an example, one area was an area that was filled when the local inlet was filled. That was a zero. I didn't even count that area because the frequency of good targets was so low. But next to that area there was another area where there was a lot of daily replenishment on the sand bar. It was a good place to hunt when you couldn't depend find a good hot spot. However just to the south of that and a bit closer to the beach was another area where things accumulated over time and where you could almost always find a good supply of tarnished older targets that had accumulated over time. I'd consider the bar, the dip inside the bar, and the frequently producing area to the south to be three separate spots even though they were very close to each other.
Some spots were continually replenished with high value targets, like the sand bar I just mentioned. However an area that didn't have as many new targets could be better if decades of accumulated targets were suddenly exposed. Generally speaking, I'd rather hunt an old area that really opened up than a newer area where the good targets had not been sifted, sorted, gathered and accumulated.
Many of those spots, and some of the best, were seldom detected by anyone else. It seemed that most of the people went to the locations where there were always a lot of fresh targets.
Still I didn't spend as much time as some other people. I had teaching and consulting jobs and seldom spent more than four hours at once, yet I did get out and was able to pretty well monitor a nice stretch of beach.
___
If you are interested in learning all you can about Spanish Colonial coinage, here is a link for you. The document is entitled Coinage of El Peru, compiled by William L Bischoff, and originally presented in 1988 but electronically published in 2016.
It is a lengthy compilation of serious studies. I won't try to describe it more than that. If you are into the numismatics of Spanish Colonial coins, take a look for yourself.
---
Don't expect anything more than a two foot surf or the next week.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
