More gold at a basketball court...on film!

[REVIER]

Yea, got the whole thing on film.
About time too, I have been looking stupid walking around with this camera on my head for a few weeks waiting to find something great and get it on film.

A pop out 14k medallion, hollow but it still weighs in at 4.7 grams.

The F2, sniper coil and a new basketball court to hunt...plus the recent rains finally made digging fun and easy again.
It doesn't get any better than this.

I have about 2 hours of film of this hunt, but here is an edited 5 minute version that shows the best part.


[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuklvGoeuZM&feature=c4-overview&list=UUpjgKU3qrKYB57QV5wB3yog[/video]

 

[mudpuppy]

It was finally great to see how you work those areas...you have a smooth deployment of your gear, very efficient and great coverage of that ground...now it all makes sense why you do real well on gold..
Cool video, thanks for taking the effort to show us!
Mud

 

[REVIER]

Thanks mud.
I have some fans on another forum that have been asking me to show how I do this especially using the F2, why am I so fast and how I find and dig so many targets in my allotted time at these sites and this vid shows some of that.
If you notice in the vid I never kneel down, I usually just bend over at the waist, dig the target after zeroing in with the Propointer and move on which is something I do on most targets unless I am going deep.
The fact that I still had battery power in my camera and room left on my SD card when I came across this thing was a stroke of luck, too.

 

[mudpuppy]

Yeah, thats how I hunt too, I almost never kneel, just stoop over and stab with a screwdriver...Your video showed me how a person uses a trowel and Propointer properly...I always thought it would be too slow, but you are definitely fast on the grab..(and that is important) .I can see a flat sharp trowel with the Propoint are pretty effective they way you are hunting...again, thanks..I learned a lot from watching it..
Mud

 

[REVIER]

Yeah, thats how I hunt too, I almost never kneel, just stoop over and stab with a screwdriver...Your video showed me how a person uses a trowel and Propointer properly...I always thought it would be too slow, but you are definitely fast on the grab..(and that is important) .I can see a flat sharp trowel with the Propoint are pretty effective they way you are hunting...again, thanks..I learned a lot from watching it..
Mud

Thanks again!

Sometimes I watch videos on youtube and get really frustrated seeing how some others use, (or actually don't use), the Propointer the way I do, how they dig holes and how long it takes them to recover targets.
I do get down on a knee when I have to go deep, but most targets are 6" or less and I can usually recover these pretty quickly if the dirt is in good shape without kneeling.
I have hunted with many others in the past and I usually can smoke most of them as far as volume of targets dug, and as we all know the higher the volume the better chance you have to find something great.

I am not sure exactly how, why or when I fell into this speed recovery thing without kneeling but it just slowly evolved over time and it is very natural for me to hunt this way now.
I also have to give some credit to the great soil we have here in Kansas.
As you can see by this gold target recovery if the conditions are right most of the time I can just stick my digger in the soil at one spot, pry up a bit and a nice round plug just pops up most of the time.
This is NOT anything like what I had to deal with in that lousy clay filled, concrete hard soil I dealt with back in Birmingham.

This speed comes in very handy at competition hunts and this Sunday I have paid to enter two at our MD club's annual end of the year hunt and festivities.
Last year was my first time ever doing these and I was fast enough, (using my Compadre with the 7" coil), to not only gather enough silver coins to pay for this years entry fee but I also found a few prize tokens to get about $350 worth of prizes including a top of the line Bill Babbs travel scoop.

I hope to do just as well this year and my great club not only gathers top shelf prizes, (not cheap garbage), but this year we have not just one but 3 nice detectors as the top line awards.
Hopefully on Monday I will be posting and showing pictures of my brand new filly in the stable if I am lucky and good enough.

 

[ken ward]

I learned something too. You find all the gold.. I enjoyed the video. It looks like your ground is easy to dig in. Mine here in Indiana is still hard.. Good job... KEN

 

[REVIER]

I learned something too. You find all the gold.. I enjoyed the video. It looks like your ground is easy to dig in. Mine here in Indiana is still hard.. Good job... KEN

I haven't been hunting a lot for the last few weeks because of the same conditions.
Luckily, we had some blessed rain in the last week so conditions greatly improved and became perfect.

 

[ohmygato]

REVIER,

Thanks for the post - it certainly is very informative. I thought you were more of a "dig it all" kind of guy but it looks like you are just going after gold-range targets. Is that correct?

-Dan

 

[REVIER]

I am going after all targets that are solid in tone and had numbers that didn't jump more than 2 on the screen.
If I was using My Compadre or Vaq at sites like this I dig all signals that come in clean with very little or no noise as I go past the fade out point and then back down to hear how they come in.
There is enough trash that comes in solid like good targets do so dig it all is a misnomer...it is really dig all solid, firm signals.
Iffy targets are rarely ever dug by myself unless I have cleaned out a site and that is the only kind of signals left to dig.

On the F2 most signals that jump more than 2 for me are usually trash, as are targets that break up too much on my Tesoros as I dial them in

This is why it is important to learn your chosen machine as well as possible.
I have learned what is trash and what is not by what I see and hear, or at least what I suspect are good and bad targets.
You never know till you dig it, but I have gotten good enough with all of mine to be able to leave most of the more unstable targets in the ground and not have a bad case of the what ifs going on when I do.
I also return to sites like this and continue to dig.
Masking is a bigger problem than most might suspect so by getting lots of good targets out of the way some of those more iffy targets just might become good ones if I do my job right.

Here I only knocked out iron, and I was digging everything from foil on up so yea, I was digging gold range targets because that can come in anywhere.
On just about every hunt I will dig all high tones, most zinc signals in all ranges and everything else solid because gold is always my prime target and as I said that can come in anywhere from iron to zinc...or in rare cases higher.

I always use my F2 at my first visits to sites like this because I want to get the lay of the land and figure out how much and what kind of trash is hanging out there and the screen helps with this.
I clean out all of the solid targets first, and that might take a few visits, them eventually bring in the Compadre to find anything I missed including chains and then the Vaq is next to hopefully find the deepest targets if it a very old site I am hunting.

I tend to dig a little more trash with my Tesoros that is another reason I use the F2 for the first few times at new sites like these basketball courts.

Here is a pic of everything else good that was dug on this hunt and it mostly came from around the court area.

 

[atomicscott]

Great stuff again Revier! It seems as though you skip over a lot of ground and don't seem to overlap swings, Is this due to a time crunch?

 

[REVIER]

Great stuff again Revier! It seems as though you skip over a lot of ground and don't seem to overlap swings, Is this due to a time crunch?

Yep, or more like I was just trying to get a good idea of what is out here being my first time so I wandered around and didn't really grid or anything.
I returned after this hunt and took way more time on the side of this court where I found the gold trying to hit every square inch I could.
Found more clad on that trip but not anything else really good.
I return to sites like these over and over so I will eventually find more of the great stuff if it is there.

 

[deliveryboy]

Great find, and this is my recovery method as well, I like to grab targets quickly and move on to the next. I do get on one knee mostly since I am 6'3" and not that limber but recovery method is the same otherwise.

 

[REVIER]

As long as we are on the subject, just found gold target #9 this morning.
Second piece of gold in 5 days...and a little silver to top it off, too!
http://www.findmall.com/read.php?91,1965996

 

[atomicscott]

Thanks again man, you always get me thinking about how to increase my chances.