i was new to this hobby once too/ just reminiscing

[GRAY GHOST]

hello all, i can remember some of the major mistakes [haha] that i made in this hobby early on, so here goes: i guess i was about 14 or so, had my first radio shack detector and green as grass. barely controlling myself, i snuck out to my uncle joes 16 acres in pa. and proceeded to dig up the whole yard! with a stolen butterknife! oh, that hurt! i didnt have the sense to go to the shed and get a shovel. dug every beep, and soon had a stack of junk. the treasure had to be here somewhere! well, it wasnt, and a couple of years later bought an old whites for 5 dollars, quite a sum back then, boy was i excited, what a step up! i put the batteries in... and... nothing. all the inside wiring and controls were gone! man, i was dejected then. it seemed i was the only one in the whole world who metal detected. id never even seen anybody else in the area detecting. by chance came across an old coinmaster 3, for 15 bucks. i tried it out this time though, and it was on! youve never seen such an excited 17 year old running across the fields and creeks, only to be tired when i got there. if wealth was measured in poptops...had the bad habit of cramming all my finds in my pants pockets, until holes appeared. then the dumb thing - i kept wearing them, and consequently losing all the good stuff back to the ground! what a hardhead! and lost my new batteries too. so here i am, in the middle of my first good [and actually planned] hunt, the machine dies and no batteries. it was a long walk. its not been forgotten since either. or the time me and cousin joel were shot by rocksalt by farmer evans for trespassing and tearing up his cornfield! OUCH! that did hurt. all that just because i wanted to detect his cornfield. without his permission, of course. these are still to this day oh-so-hard learned lessons, that i chuckle at today. what were yours? hh,

 

[tabdog]

The first time I went metal detecting was with a group and just two detectors. We were hunting at Pea Ridge Battle Field before it was against the law to detect there. We found a couple of artifacts and ran into a Modle-T Ford that had just kind of sunk into the ground. We spent the rest of the day trying to dig up rusted out car parts. Left with nothing much to show. I personally had nothing.

When I was older I got an old Technatics. One of the early VLF motion discreminators. I would desc out stuff and quit if it got too hard to find things. I got into a habbit of quitting and going to an easier place. Even though I made some good finds, I thought that finding the good stuff was beyond of my ability to detect.

Now that I have started back in this hobby, I have learned not to give up. As a matter of fact, when I get wooped, it just makes me more determined to find a way to succeed.

I have learned confidence, which just may be one of the most important things I can take into the field with me.

HH,