Comparing my hunts to the pros.

[cwilk]

Can I pop pennies like John? Sometimes.

Can I find as many dollar coins as Uncle Willy? Maybe someday. Theres a Sac in the pic somewhere.

This pic represents yesterday evening and today. I had a hunt yesterday morning that I didn't photograph. The brass pocket watch and check valve are cool. Both were supposed to be half dollars and the watch was ten inches deep. Never found a fingernail clippers before either. More nickels than quarters is unusual.

Chris

Major milestone next hunt or the one after that.

 

[big john]

COOL FIND

 

[Roscue2]

n/t

 

[cwilk]

I'm not fit to carry their digging tools but thanks for the kind words.

I have been blessed to be detecting in an area where clad is largely ignored by my fellow hunters. I realized early on that there were a lot of detectors concentrating on the super old silver producing sites so I have been gobbling clad up for two years. I occasionally hit one of their spots just as they occasionally hit one of mine. I am having to travel greater distances to get big clad totals too. The sites I started at have really dried up. A nearby elementary school I loved to detect produced over 2000 coins and a lot of jewelry! Now I'm lucky to get 10 coins there in an hour.

Yesterday morning I found myself at a park and another detectorist showed up. I watched him pretty closely and he was almost always swinging and rarely digging. He was using the same machine as me, GTI 2500 but with the old coil. We chatted and he said he had been detecting for 10 years. He said he only hunted that particular park once in a while because he had cleaned it out. In the past year I've found well over 1000 coins there, a gold ring, half a dozen silver rings and a pile of old bullets. If this is his idea of cleaned out I'll take it. When I left I went over to say good-bye. He was digging a hole that looked like bomb crater and eventually found a clad quarter. We had both been at it for 2 hours. His take was a dozen or so coins. My take was 89 coins but I only dug 20 or so coins out of my pocket to show him my take. The moral of this story is practice, practice, practice. As I got more and more skilled, sites where I found very little started producing more and more coins which I am now able to recover with great speed. He was a very nice guy but not very skilled at target recovery even though he is using a machine that is a very accurate pinpointer.

I was going to post this yesterday but then I thought he might be a member here. Since hardly anybody reads into a thread I'll post it as a reply.

Keep practicing and figure out how to post photos of your hunts. Hope you're enjoying your vacation.

Chris

 

[metalhead]

I just looked in my book to double check and under "pros" is listed Chris, John and Uncle Willy. So, you're a pro in my book Hey thanks for showin' us the clad this time. We love them dirty old coinsCool finds, man. Hey, I see that you got a wheatie there in the lower right corner of pic. What year is that? No silver amongst all the other coins. I guess that was snatched up years ago. That's hilarious how that guy said he "cleaned out" that park where you had found a bunch of goodies. Yeah, sometimes I prefer to hunt places that people say are "hunted out"Happy Hunting

 

[Quartzsite]

Just having fun and not getting all serious is what makes the best pro's

 

[lazyaussie]

i vote your a pro to theres not many detectorists on this site that dig the large amounts of coins you do.
great pile of loot by the way
lazyaussie

 

[cwilk]

n/t

 

[cwilk]

I dig a lot of clad and jewelry but I am not skilled in either old coin or relic hunting. You find quite a bit more gold than me so I reckon you're a pro too.

Chris

 

[cwilk]

One thing I can say is it is ALWAYS fun. Never had a hobby I got so addicted to. Coming home with a big pile of money and an occasional gold ring is a bonus!

Chris

 

[Uncle Willy]

Where's the rest of the watch? That's an oldie, or appears to be.

Bill

 

[Uncle Willy]

Yeah bud no site is ever cleaned out, just less coins than there used to be at easy depths. Folks seem to forget that at peak depth ( with a concentric coil ) their signal is only covering an area about the size of a quarter, not the size of the coil they see sliding across the ground. So even if you overlap each swing 50% you're still missing a whole lot of real estate at peak depth.

Since most coins and rings will fit into an area of about one-square inch - say you are hunting a 10'x10' plot of ground. This plot contains 14,400 square inches or that many potential targets and there's no way one could ever cover every one of those inches. I'd sure like to hunt in your neck of the woods. It used to be like that here many years ago but this is a big city and there are just to many beeper swingers here and at one time we had five or six detector manufacturers here in Oregon.

Bill

 

[RickIowa2009]

Looks like you were very busy!

 

[cwilk]

You'd clean up, in clad anyway. Some day I hope I'm known as the guy who cleaned out all the clad inlocal public parks.

I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to start knocking on doors for permission to hunt older houses.

Chris

 

[cwilk]

Man, I looked and looked for it in the hole where I found it. There was no sign of the mechanism or the crystal. I think it might have met with a mower because there is a small nick in the case. I did a pretty good sweep of a 10 by 10 foot square around the hole in true all metal. Dug about a dozen nails.

It appears to be gold over brass to me.

Chris

 

[Uncle Willy]

Yeah too bad you couldn't have found more of it. I've got an oldie like that around here somewhere but it ain't gold. I love those old pocket watches.

Bill

 

[Uncle Willy]

That's a good and often rewarding gig.

Bill