Hello all beach hunters.
Yes, I beach hunt and use a long wood handle shovel and a homemade basket. The basket is 12" in diameter and is 12" tall, like a bucket but made out of 1/2" wire mesh, sides and bottom. The top opening is held open with a plastic hoop. I tied a short cord across the top, sort of like a bucket handle and tied a 4 ft cord to the center of that. I added an "S" hook made from a coat hanger on the end of the 4' cord so I can attach the hook to the bottom of the basket and sling it over my shoulder so the WOT coil does not detect the basket.
You can make the basket any size, hovever I recommend an opening large enough for the shovel to fit into so the target can be easily deposited.
To use this set up, I use a homemade harness that supports the weight of the MD shaft/coil with doubled 1/8" bungee cord. This allows my two hands to be free to use the shovel when I locate a traget. Once the target is located, I place the coil aside and I just place the shovel about 7 to 8 inches behind the target and press the shovel straight down and dig until I get the target on top of the sand. Then I locate it with the coil and then scoop it up with the shovel and deposit it in the wire mesh bucket. When the bucket gets full of sand, I get any where from 5 to 8 targets, depending on how deep they were and how well I located the target in the sand pile. Shallow targets can just be approached with the shovel at about a 45 degree angle and then directly deposited in the bucket.
Once you find a hot spot, this is a very fast way to retrieve your targets; typically about 15 seconds from detection to retrieval.
I hope this gives you some ideas. I've been using this system for over 10 years and I would not go back to a scoop. With the WOT coil, I can get undisturbed coins beyond 15" so the retrieval is really excavating.
bbsailor
