There’s a guy named scuba detector(something like that) on the forum and I think he’s the expert. Hopefully he will chime in soon enough. From my experience, it’s a lot harder than one would think. You’re down there, sound is coming from everywhere, bubbles are loud, detector chirps, then you gotta pinpoint. Then you start digging or sifting and now you can’t see your hand in front of your face. What I’ve done is first sift with my hand, if I see it or feel it great, if not, I start taking handfuls of the sand and putting them in a mesh bag. Eventually you’re going to get a cloudy mess all around and won’t be able to see a thing until it settles back to the bottom. I can feel a good target in my mesh bag even if I can’t see it. Then you move a couple feet and get another target and if you’re lucky you’re not still in the haze from your last target. If you are it just ain’t fun, unless you’re in ring city. If the sand is not deep and there’s hard clay below then you gotta dig, a little trowel or a flat headed screwdriver works. Go slow, try not to stir up a lot but for me it seems inevitable. I’m a numbers guy, though. I dig as many signals as I can when my head is above water. It gets old diving when you can’t see. I’ve really have got to have some motivation to do the diving thing and conditions have to be pretty clear for me to stay down any length of time. Now swimming along the bottom and picking up treasures I can see is a blast. Like sunglasses.
