Colombian Gold & Silver with the MX Sport

[MattBullSummerville]

Last week had a wedding in Barranquilla Colombia and spent a couple of days in Cartagena where we flew into. On the Island of Baru near Cartagena I was able to convince the family to give me a few hours metal detecting each day. I could have taken my Infinium but because of the weight decided to pack the MX Sport. Locals were excited to see the finds in the sand. Mostly beer bottle caps, or checkas as they call them. They acted like they had never seen a metal detector. What they didn't get a look at was the good stuff that came out of the surf. MX Sport ran great, was surprised it handled so well in the surf since it's neutral buoyancy. The water there is very clear and easy to see your finds. Wish I had taken a decent scoop because there was a lot of broken coral on the bottom. Best finds, 6.6 gram 925 Silver ring, 7.6 gram 14k gold band and 2,100 pesos, ( 88 cents) The other ring and charm are junk. Beer of choice seems to be the Aguila. The really rusted beer tops showed as copper pennies. Ran the MX Sport in Beach program with sensitivity 4-5, anything else started to false. I have noticed though even in the dirt the sensitivity can be ran lower on the MX Sport with the same results as the MXT and MX5 at higher settings. Give me a week on the tourist beaches of Cartagena with my pi or even an Xcal and I'll bet I can pay for the round trip ticket.

 

[jim tn]

Nice job of the bottle caps. Gold and silver not bad either. Looks like a fun time. HH jim tn

 

[MattBullSummerville]

Oh, and you should see the thong bikinis but I better not post those pictures here. Sometimes made it hard to pay attention to detecting,

 

[bootyhoundpa]

Nice hunting... quite the captive audience watching you hunt...

 

[Dighistory]

Nice trip. Always day dreamed of the opportunity to hunt somewhere like that. Thanks for sharing your experience, and best luck to you.

 

[King Bee]

What kind of tones were you getting on the different items? Still getting to know my sport.

 

[MattBullSummerville]

My settings were Beach program with 8 tones, reject volume of 20%, sensitivity 4-5 depending on how high I could run it without getting an over load. The MX Sport really did not false, it would just over load if I tried to go higher. The Gold band was a mid tone with a VDI of 45 to 47 and saying Misc. Silver ring bounced around a little from 78-85 with a higher tone. Most VDIs were 85 and reading half or silver dollar. I wasn't in the water 15 minutes and in ankle deep water when the Silver ring sounded off. The Gold ring was between knee and waste high water where there was a little drop off, on the lower side, or ocean side of the drop off. The junk peace ring gave a 75-77 VDI and was reading penny. It was more shallow as well. The small junk charm was in the wet sand and had a VDI of 16-18 like a nickel, reading nickel and only 3 or 4 inches deep.

I'm still trying to get a good feel for all the programs as well. Still need to put some time in on the All Metal, Prospecting, and Relic program. Occurred to me yesterday that there may be a good use for the High Trash also when running the stock 10 inch coil. I was at a very trashy ball field and after I left the thought came to me that I could of used the High Trash program and accepted one or more of the bottom rejected discrimination bins to fit the area I was searching. There was so much foil and trash I was getting 4 to 6 rejected and accepted tones every square foot in some places. You can swing real slow and still get accurate VDIs and tones though.

I am chomping at the bit to try a concentric coil on this detector, and really feel a small coli like the 5.3 or the 4x6 Shooter is going to be a killer coil in heavy trash. I hope this information helps you get up and running finding lots of great finds with you MX Sport.