Actually thinking about this some more....one way to get your silver count up...well, this is what i do, the way i think...i avoid parks. i avoid anything that looks obvious from a "drive-by"...some of the best areas are not obvious. if you can research old maps, old books, history books, use the internet, old pictures, there are clues to areas that had activity back in the old days that you would never guess nowadays that anything ever happened there. i also like to try areas with interesting geologic features such as natural lakes, creeks/rivers, ridges, where people would come to and walk around for whatever reason. this is a tactic to find areas that "our" predecessors (other detectorists past and present)...might have missed or hit lightly. in my opinion parks are just too obvious. finding the spot without all the pressure is the key for my style of detecting. in my mind almost ALL of the "easy" stuff is gone. once a silver coin is dug, its dug forever and it will never come back. the last place id detect is right in the middle field/play area of a park. i know people still find a lot of good, deep stuff in parks. its just not the style that i choose. i hate digging clad. reseaching old areas, looking for hints to potential spots, is as much fun as detecting is to me. im pretty hardcore and will take a physical beating when i detect. if you can find some of these out of the way, never detected areas, you can find things you wont beleive, my last silver find a week ago was a 1902 barber quarter and it was laying on the surface under some leaves. think outside the box. think like other detectorists would think, but then do something different.
im NOT saying any style of detecting is right or wrong. im sure people that hunt parks might take offense but that is not what i mean. im just saying my mentality is to avoid "past" competetition. its almost impossible it seems. i guess this comes from using a weaker detector for so many years. maybe my mindset will change once i start to really understand the etrac(?)