Shallow water beach hunting

[Reddog777]

Experience hunters......what are the best settings for shallow water hunting with the Sov. GT? Thanks.

 

[Critterhunter]

I've done a good bit of wading with my GT. Same as for land. Zero out notch and discrimination. Iron Mask ON for a tad more depth and better ability to see non-ferrous stuff in ferrous junk (iron). I always stay on noise band 2 but try 1 if EMI is a problem. See which allows higher sensitivity settings. Sensitivity as high as it will go but still keep a threshold and not be falsing too much. I usually ride my sensitivity right to the edge where it falses a bit here and there but isn't so bad that it's going to cause me to miss targets thinking they are false hits. If your at at a rough beach with very bad mineralization keep lowering sensitivity until it's stable and the threshold isn't dropping out all the time (too fast of a sweep can cause that to happen too...try slowing down your sweep to a crawl before lowering sensitivity to see if that works). If you find you've had to drop the sensitivity past say about 4PM to 4:30 or so to get it stable then might as well throw it into Auto as it will get about the same depth of that low of a manual setting and yet be much smoother.

Some guys hunt in All Metal Fixed (after setting ground balance in track) or pin point mode as they feel it gives them more depth at the beach and even some use that on land. Some say they can still tell iron from non-ferrous stuff in those modes with practice, but others will then flip to discriminate to check the target to see if it's iron or not. A lot of Excal guys use PP mode to hunt water and beaches too. I think all metal or PP modes also allow faster sweep speeds. Others don't feel all metal or PP mode are as deep as discriminate for them. You need to test that yourself at the beach because I think it depends on the minerals and such. Even if PP or discriminate isn't deeper, being able to sweep faster I think and probably better ability to hit on fine gold chains and small gold earings (they can read well into the iron range) is a reason alone why some use those modes. The way I look at it discrimination mode on these BBS machines is already going deeper than pretty much any VLF machine on the market so I just hunt in discriminate myself at the beach and on land, but I will be playing with PP/all metal some at cleaner sites to see if it is deeper for me. Might have a use at those sites for me then.

Many salt water guys prefer PI machines or the PP or all metal modes because iron rots away fast on those beaches. At freshwater beaches I hunt it would be insanity to hunt in those modes because the iron takes years to rot away and is all over. That's also why most guys will never use a PI unit on fresh water beaches.