Thanks, everyone, for all the nice and helpful comments. My monthly finds came from a variety of different locations, here in Brown County and neighboring Comanche County (home of the famous gunfighter John Wesley Hardin), Texas. I went back to one of the permission locations, across the street from where I found the Sgt. Major hat pin and several of the best finds, yesterday and hunted for about 90 minutes. This particular small area had already given up a large number of modern coins (mostly zinc pennies) but yesterday I concentrated on a small area next to the curb and found 23 copper and zinc cents, a quarter, 3 dimes, and a nickel plus a yet unidentified button and an old Cadillac hood emblem. I estimate that I've already found over 100 coins on this small lot where an old house sat for many decades.
I was digging a deep target and talking to myself, as I often do when detecting alone, and I heard someone say "Are you finding anything?" ha. I looked up to see an older man standing about 3 feet away. I hadn't even noticed him approach so I don't know how long he'd been standing there. I really get into my metal detecting and when I'm on the trail of a target, that's all I focus on. I stood up and he introduced himself and told me that he was the owner of the house next door and that he owned the 3 adjoining lots to the permission lot I was working on. I introduced myself and gave him the usual introductory message about my hobby and gave him one of our club's business cards. He said he figured that was who I was as he has been following my metal detecting and treasure hunting posts on our local social media sites and generously gave me permission to hunt his adjoining lots! He also told me a story about the people who had last occupied the house that was formerly on the lot I was hunting. It seems they had stolen someone's large collection of gold Krugerrands many years ago and not knowing what they were and being afraid the cops would catch them with the collection, they dumped the box of them across the fence onto another man's vacant lot. They got caught eventually but the police only recovered most of the stolen goods but not all of them. Some of the coins are still missing. Now for the good part.
He gave me the name of the owner of that vacant lot and 4 other lots on the block and I recognized the name but do not know the owner personally so he's going to check with him about getting me permission to hunt those lots as well! If I obtain those permissions, I'm going to be a very busy boy for the next several weeks. This is an excellent example of why I'm always happy to share this wonderful hobby with people who approach me while I'm detecting and especially with as many people as I can reach on social media. I often hear other area treasure hunters complain that they don't have any good places to hunt around here. That sure hasn't been my problem. My problem is deciding which of my many permissions and public areas I want to hunt next.
I've been researching and studying our Central Texas area's history for most of my life and I was raised here so I know that this area holds a massive amount of unrecovered treasure, both big and small, and is probably one of the Top 5 treasure laden areas in the entire country, if not #1.
And, yes Doc, those Nox boys are already complaining that their expensive detectors outperform the Ace 250 by miles but like the old timers always said "the proof's in the pudding" and we have several Equinox users in our club and yet I'm leading them all in this year's CTTC Treasure Hunter of the Year race, all of them by quite a large margin. My nearest competitor, who was tied with me until this month's Finds of the Month vote, uses an XP Deus and he's a very good and experienced detectorist who gets out there and puts in the field hours to get the job done. My challenge to Equinox users around the country is always open. Come to Brownwood and I'll take you to one of my permission sites and we can go head-to-head and see who finds the most and the best.
~Texas Jay
