Slim Pickin's In The Surf Lane This Morning...

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

Hit the lane at 5 AM with Jack and Darren and for the 7 AM low tide.
There was no shortage of hunters but from what I saw and heard, a surprising shortage of targets. Usually we're rolling in it by this time on the 4th Of July weekend. Maybe things will pick up tomorrow.

I did luck up and get a thin 10K gold band in the surf, about 5 minutes into my 3.5 hour hunt but after that all I was able to come up with was another junker ring, a meager amount of clad, and a few things that SOUNDED good but turned out to be doo-doo.

Here's the catch for me...
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[GraveDiggerMax-VaBch-Va]

n/t

 

[bdahunter]

n/t

 

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

I told Darren I'd trade it to him for the nice silver bracelet he found. He just chuckled. As for the dolphin, sorry to say I have a few of them.

Looks like John is the Mac Daddy of the lane for this weekend...maybe for the summer!

 

[thirdbornau]

Mke you are such a lucky soul i haven't found even a ring like that let alone what you call slim pickings. I think i will faint on the spot if it happens, i keep trying watch the mail.

Maureen..

 

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

You will have you share, I have no doubt. If you put in the hours it eventually pays off. I went out this morning from about 6 AM to 9 AM for the 7:30 low tide and did dismally. And by that I mean about $2 in clad and a cheap bangle bracelet with some fake diamonds in it. But my 6 year old niece that's visiting loved it, so I guess it was a success in her eyes. We all get skunked sometimes.

 

[thirdbornau]

Mike had a day like that today as you say (skunked) i still have a feeling my expl isn't doing it's job. Today down at the beach i have screw tops,pull tops,all ferrous things crossed out and blow me down what did we pull up ( bottle top after bottle top) that's not right so in the end we went back to factory settings and dug up more bottle tops.
We got tired of it and went home.Also we get a find sit showed up with a low count ( coin or ring it said) we dug and dug what did we get a can.
I will try to get a local involved so that when we have a problem he can say this is what you do in this instance that may help. Back to the manual i guess.

I found coins, a set of keys,a fish hook,safety pins and lots of junk does that tell you anything? i tried to cheer myself up and said if it's not there it's not there.

Good hunting for you bet you have scored again already Regards Maureen..

 

[Mike (Virginia Beach)]

Well if you knock out pull tops and other aluminum items such as foil then you can pretty much forget getting any gold rings, since they are nearly identical to aluminum trash. As for the icons, forget them. I haven't seen a detector yet that had a great degree of accuracy with the icons, other than with coins and that's not always true either. The bottom line is that a metal detector detects metal. And every non-ferrous metal comes in on that scale of conductivity somewhere between 0 and 32 on the scale. A quarter at 6 inches can register a 29 and so can a beer can at 14 inches. It's not just the Explorer that gets that wrong.

What you need to do is to get a feel for whether a target is a LARGE target or a small one. You can do that by raising the coil off the ground a tad and swinging over it again to see how much the signal diminishes. You can do this while pinpointing too. A big target will still be reading when you raise the coil up 4 to 6 inches and a coin or ring won't, for the most part. And when you're in pinpoint and swinging over the target and raise it just a tad then a coin or ring will "get small" real quick.

Try this. Get a blanket and lay it out on some clean ground without any metal targets under it. Get all of your jewelry and coins of all flavors and some trash items. Spread them out at least a foot or so apart and scan over each one several times. See how they read. See how they pinpoint. Practice the raising the coil trick. Get a feels for the SOUNDS (and the numbers if you prefer) but forget the icons. Once you feel comfortable, then go back to the beach. Set the Explorer up with Iron Mask on and set it to IM-12 and that should knock out most of the hard core iron stuff. I would set the sensitivity to about 18 for the beach and then dig what sounds good per your previous testing. I run IM-16 which means you're hearing everything and then I dig what I like but that may be a little much for you to digest just yet, listening to all that. I also run "Ferrous" tones when I hunt with my Explorer II because I like the sounds better. Hope all that helps some.

 

[thirdbornau]

Thanks Mike,

Also here in Australia we don't have the population you have over there so i do think that makes a difference. Yesterday we went to a beach that is really large and is used by tourists a lot,well you won't believe how big this beach is and it was as clean as it could possibly be.They had scraped the whole beach clean with some machine you couldn't even find a bit of seaweed or paper.Now we were convinced they had magnets in their cleaning apparatus we hardly heard a tone,the beach looked great though, and i would love to know where they dump that junk and MD it.

Bye for now Happy hunting.
Maureen.