Prizes are received from donations and purchased from early entry fees and it is difficult to guess what we would receive for donations & entries in a hunt. Treasure hunters & fishermen sometimes exaggerate & I exaggerated the amount of items we wanted to put in the ground for the St Jude Children's Research Hospital hunt and I apologize.
To make things run easier at St Jude & BONE hunts, & have no long lines collecting prizes, we put donated merchandise received in the Charity St Jude Chinese Auction and buried all the metal donated items.
For the Open Hunt, we purchase at wholesale, coins, medals, silver & gold coins, jewelry, tokens, & replica coins, & the dealer always gives us a free bag of donated coins & jewelry. We always receive 100s of donations & I akways donate about $2,000 worth of previously found finds too.
It was previously decided, if cache tokens were not claimed, prizes would be held for a future St Jude Fund Charity hunt and not just handed out as bonus door prizes. This worked will, until this year, when hunters only found 1/2 of the buried tokens.
We purchased prizes & with donated prizes we put all in the ground & we had close to 800 targets. We also put bonus tokens in the ground for a Garrett Ace 150, a Garrett Ace 250, 2 Gold coins, 4 silver dollars, 1846 Seated Liberty silver dollar, a Tec T-2 metal detector, $50 of silver coins, 1885 U.S. $5 Gold coin, & a Lost Treasure, Digger & Gazette subscription.
This year, the hunt field was soggy & wet. Good signals weren't right on & many good targets were left in the ground, frustrating hunters.
I have listened to the constructive Critismn and the 2008 Hunt hunt committee will address them & try to solve them.
George Streeter