So I was driving around today looking for a place to do some detecting. I drove over a bridge and could see a spot down river where there was about 15 feet of sand showing because the water is down so much. Decided that was as good a spot as any to try my luck today. I knew it was going to be trashy so I put the 5X8 DD coil on my AT-Pro and started hunting. Right away I started getting tons of high tones...lead sinkers...I was expecting that. I was digging just about everything not in the iron range just in case. Well I was digging plenty of sinkers, getting some pennies, and dug up 3 fishing lures. Then I got a mid tone and a VDI of 48. So I started digging, I dug down about 5 inches thru the nasty black sand/mud and finally got the target out of the hole. I was pleasantly suprised to see a nearly black ring in the muck. By the looks of it I was thinking darn it, just a junk ring. Well I took it over to the water and rinsed it off and proceeded to look for any possible markings on the inside of the ring. Holy cow...to my delight I see 10K stamped on the inside. This ring was tarnished and worn pretty bad...I have never seen gold that dark. Well I got it home and took some pics of it, then got out my gold cleaning jewelers cloth and started working on it. It cleaned up really nice and could see that it had some letters on the top of the ring. Best I can guess because some letters are completely worn off is that it says "SOUVENIR". It is definitely an older ring and has had a hard life...lol. Anyways I weighed it and its only 1.92 grams but gold is gold and I'm ecstatic that its my first gold for 2013. I'm planning on going back down there and hunting more...tons of targets to dig. I took an after picture of how it cleaned up. I almost missed the ring as there was a can buried close but that was screaming in my ears..I dug it up after the ring. Moral of the story...swing very slow in trashy areas or you might miss something.
The ring after I cleaned it
The ring after I cleaned it
