E-trac beach settings

[stevew]

I need your help fellow etracers I'm going up to Maine for some serious beach detecting. I wanted some help on settings and specific tactics to make me successful like where should I focus on.

Thanks Steve

 

[Sailorman]

Well, every place seems different. You have both low and high tide lines, coin lines, towel lines, parking lines (if there's on beach parking), etc. Some places have some black sand, some a lot and some none at all. Then using the same tactics on the same beaches works one day and not the next. Some folks will only hunt cuts others just start walking the water line at low tide. I mix up various tactics through the day to see what might produce.

But look for things like concentrations of heavy shells, coarser sand, things like that. Cuts, erosion, low spots are likely areas as well. The beach can change with every tide cycle as to where it's best to hunt.

As for settings what works for me in my location is deep off, fast off, trash low, ground neutral (unless there's a lot of black sand), tones long. I also often hunt in pinpoint mode unless it get's too noisy. Seems to run a little deeper here but sometimes it falses on concentrations of black sand. Some places I can run in manual sens at 25 or more but often times I resort to auto +3. Just depends on how noisy the manual sens is.

I run in a pretty open screen with 27 FE and up taken out and dig everything else.

 

[Samuel_Champlain_FTW]

I am a neighbour of the lovely state of Maine. I am sure that our coastal geology is similar and I'll be sitting here refreshing the page, looking for some more of those great tips.

OP, I'd give you help, but my Etrac is en route and I have yet to use one. Meditech is a forum user from my area who has used it on the beach. I forget the settings, but he mentioned it worked great. I'm sure he wouldn't mind you sending him a PM.

 

[E-TREC-Virginia]

Steve, if you have access to Andy Sabisch's book "The Minelab Explorer and E-Trac Handbook", it has a very nice section on beach hunting techniques, patterns, and settings.