I ended up going to my new spot with the stock 8X10 coil . The spot is a grove of Eucalyptus trees on a mountain where a fire had taken place couple of months ago . It's next to a fire trail/access road which is also near a school . I parked at the school , then detected my way up the hill . my first find was a piece of foil . The next signal was a zinc coin (my first coin with the Vaquero) , Next a Gem single edged razor blade followed by two partially melted , swollen up zincs . The area still smelled of burned Eucalyptus and the ground was black with an occasional new growth weed here and there . Crews had went up and cut a few trees down and left large and small logs there and you had to work around them .
There were also a small , wiry branches around that were getting caught in the spokes of the coil something awful ! Finally a nice signal that was coin sized , It turned out to be a twist off bottle cap at 4" deep my deepest find of the day . I made it to the end of the grove where the trees were older and larger . The ground was still blackened but not cluttered. Someone had built a small campfire spot with a stone circle . Broken bottle glass was everywhere . I found another zinc penny there .
The last tree on that grove was where I had my best luck . I eyeballed a nickel and 4 pennies right on the surface right next it , as I stooped to pick them up I noticed a few more spread out . In about a 4 ' area the ground appeared upset like someone either rooted around in it or it had been hit by water pressure . I started swinging the detector. When the coins stopped turning up I had put my coin total for the 2 hr. hunt up to 57 . All Dimes , Nickels and Pennies and all no deeper than 1" to 3" deep . The coins where all pretty cruddy looking . I ended up with 15 Dimes , 8 Nickels , 7 memorial Pennies and 27 zincs . The pinpointer on the Vaquero worked great ( even though just Xing with the coil would have been sufficient) . I did use the Garrett Pro pointer a few times as the Sun was going down and the coins were dark and hard to see in the dirt .
I did see a partial piece of a Mason type Jar which makes me wonder if this was part of somebody's " cache" . There's a few homeless people who hang out there and I did see a spot the day before near there , where there were empty cans, a frying pan a broken dish and about 12 2 Litre plastic bottles that were partially melted and fused together .
by heat . Who knows ?
All in all , It was a fun hunt , detecting the hill was a good workout and finding all those coins gave me a bit of experience with the Vaquero . I pretty much dug everything and didn't even bother thumbing the discrimination to cherry pick . I did put the discrimination closer to the nickel setting once I dug the foil though . Besides the lightness and the great build quality of the detector I liked that when it said something was there it was there not a bunch of falsing . I see that it is going to take me a while to get better on those tonal nuances but the tone is not a bad one to listen to . I'm thinking I may be getting a DD coil for it in the near future .
Some stuff came up today which prevented me from going out again . I hope to get a short hunt in tomorrow . I took a picture of my finds but my computer is refusing to take it from the camera no matter which method I try to use . If I can get the picture in within a reasonable amount of time I will add them to this thread . Thanks to all for your tips and encouragement .
H H ,
George
