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[size=large]
THE BEACHES:[/size]
[size=small]Detectorist with the X-Terra 30 behind my wife - Taken in Hawaii in 2004[/size]
Well, the first thing worth pointing out here is that apart from being a continent, Australia is also the world's largest Island. We're literally surrounded by thousands and thousands of miles of beaches. The sand here near Sydney is so good, they've coated the beaches of Waikiki in Hawaii with it after the original Hawaiian beach sand was washed out to sea after a cyclone in the 70's.
Now I first came across real Metal Detectorists in Hawaii when I was a kid. I visited again in 2004 and watched the detectorists scouring the beaches after the sun set and can now identify the detector I saw as an X-Terra 30 (it had the red shaft) because I remember pointing it out to my wife and telling her how small they've become now that they were obviously electronic these days. You can actually see a detectorist in a picture I snapped of my wife above whilst relaxing with a cocktail on the beach side garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He was really swinging like crazy too. Each day after sunset, they'd appear on the beaches with headphones and boardshorts whilst slowly checking to see what the tourists had left behind for the day. Only now do I understand why the detectorists pocketed all dug targets immediately and without looking at them. I briefly wondered what it would be like to scour the beaches for people's 'left behinds' without realizing I'd be doing just that myself in another four years.
[attachment 82536 Xterra70Beach.jpg]
[size=small]With such a small population per capita, the Australian Beaches are a spectacular place to prospect. Freshly cooked seafood available nearby can make it a great day out. Remember to bring Sunscreen![/size]
So here I am back home in Australia. I visited the beaches above Sydney -where my parents have a house overlooking the water- and gave the X-Terra a quick test before moving further away from where the crowds were. The local Prospecting store told me I'd do better where the tourists and large families of Italians were find of sitting during the day. And that I should avoid the surfer-preferred locations because 'Surfers tend to leave their wallets & valuables in the car". Made sense to me. But with all the river inlets and literally thousands of choices within short distance from one another, I just had to see what was under the sand.
The X-Terra 70 was easy to use. Beach Mode makes it run stable on moister sands. I was mortified at how much sand managed to work it's way beneath the skid plate but I removed the plate when I got home and cleaned it all out again. Easy enough. I do dislike the amount of salt that builds up on my sunglasses and camera lenses though.
I found a lot of trash at first but the areas I was scanning have been used daily for a hundred years and so I found a vast variety of coins from American half-dollars & even Singapore coinage & Kiwi denominations... to strange tokens which were probably pre-WW2. The best thing was the amount of gold jewellery to be found. It started out with some high value targets which were single earrings and the odd silver chain. But it progressed to the point where I'd dug no less that 8 gold chains, one of which was 26grams and 18ct. Plenty of rings, some silver, most were 9ct gold with a small stone. A few bullet casings, lots of sinkers, fish hooks and plenty of alluminium cans.
Now there's a little known rule here that anyone finding gold has to turn it into the local police station for a period of about 60 days to allow anyone loosing it to claim it. The charge for not doing so is called (I kid you not): "Theft By Finding". For a few of the more expensive items, I did this. Most of it was small change and about $170 in $1 & $2 coins over a period of a couple of days.
With the long beaches here, it was easy to detect during the day although a lot of fishermen seemed to find it amusing to see me scanning the sand with my detector and spent their afternoon watching me rather than their fishing rods which were planted in the sand. That's a good reason to wear dark glasses when detecting in daylight hours: to enable me to watch the watchers. Most people were naturally curious though.
[size=small]here I am in a wider shot - what you can't see is the other direction from which I've just traveled: almost 3km of smooth beach sand.[/size]
I found the detector-beach-scoops handy. I bought a galvanized one from the local Prospecting store when I first purchased my X-70 but hadn't had a chance to use it until now. The holes are wide enough to release sand but are sufficiently narrow enough to trap all Australian coins. There's a lot of tourists visiting our beaches so this would seem to account for the large number of foreign coins littering some areas. Now I deliberately sought out beaches which I felt would likely not have been detected easily. And it seems they weren't!
[size=large]
THE MOUNTAINS:[/size]
Just a short while ago, my wife and some of her girlfriends met way up in the Blue Mountains to have 'High Tea' together at the old Colonial style hotel known as 'The Hydro Majestic'. This is an old hotel. Built in the 1800s (I think) and considered to be VERY haunted. As a photographer, I took a look at their vintage "ghost" pictures and believe them to be the result of the long exposure Vs people who can't stand still for a photograph (think of the pic of the detectorist above in the background on Waikiki Beach). Still, one guest in the distant past took time to dismember his female companion and bury her head in the grounds now occupied by the Tennis Courts (see below). One of our Prime Ministers (Barton?) died atop his mistress in one of the rooms and this has been hushed up until recently. A bell was installed and rung every Sunday Morning to warn the male occupants that their wives were approaching on the train at the turn of the last Century. A second station was constructed just a bit further ahead of the rail lines especially for the mistresses who could then board the train without having to run into the wives who would alight at the main station of Leura first. I'm told there was always pandemonium when the bell was rung in the 1920s.
[size=small]A small portion of finds over several days of relentless detecting on the beaches and in the Mountains near Katoomba.[/size]
I don't like people watching me arrive someplace with a detector because it usually gets tongues wagging and triggers unnecessary opinions and paranoia. So I had broken mine down and concealed it in a hiking pack before passing through the hotel and onto the track leading through the bush and down into the valley below. After a delicious lunch at the Hotel with my wife and her friends, I reassembled the X-70 when I was in the thicker bushland and proceeded to detect. This is NOT gold bearing strata and there was no need to use prospecting mode -as much as I would have loved to have found gold so close to my city! The Gold Fields are another hour or two West of here.
[size=small]The view South from the 'Hydro Majestic' hotel's Tennis Courts - overlooking the Valley.[/size]
[size=small]Some of the Modern coins I found, along with four .45 Caliber slugs and some shells of various calibers.[/size]
After digging several bullets and finding a few bottle caps and ring tabs, I stumbled upon a thick but disintegrating plastic bag which overloaded the detector. Inside it was a rotting canvas bag. It was beside the track and sort of jammed down between a large tree and the surrounding sandstone which formed an overhang. It was filled with large, Australian copper pre-decimal pennies and half pennies. (Our Pennies are the size of a US Silver Dollar) All coins were produced after 1941 but the plastic probably wouldn't have held out that long. I'm thinking someone may have found the original canvas bag and wrapped it in plastic before leaving it where it was because the corrosion was limited to what I would expect for a drier environment. Some coins near a hole in the bag were literally green and encrusted with corrosion but most (as you can see here) were in great condition.
[size=small]The Tennis Courts - As photographed from the same place that the shot above it (showing the valley) was taken.[/size]
Now talking about interesting finds: My last trip to the Hargraves Region yielded an interesting surprise nearly two weeks after I returned. I found an old Whiskey bottle which was uncorked and filled with chunks of dry dirt and leaves - none of which would come out. There was no sign of gold inside but the bottle looked old so I took it home. I spent about a week trying to soften and extract the soil from the insides and forgot about it until recently. The leaves proved to be the hardest to budge since they stuck to the inside wall of the bottle with the now-dry eucalyptus oils. But yesterday, I was able to fill the bottle with a semi-caustic solution and stand it upright in my ultrasonic tank to loosen the debris inside. The bottle started clinking and I poured out the contents to find a few small nuggets which someone had obviously stored inside it. It's about 4.5 grams worth. The first time I went prospecting, I came home with a tiny piece of gold cemented to my Pick Axe with red clay. Sure, it was tiny (think: 0.10g) .. but these things make it worth while and add to the random nature of Prospecting.
I'm not as driven to beach detect as I like to Prospect but it's certainly interesting. I dig far more junk than good targets in some areas. Lead sinkers are everywhere here. I went out again the other day and found nothing but junk again (if you don't count the corroded 5c coin I came across). I tried to use it to pay my toll on the freeway later but they wouldn't accept it. Someone said to me recently that our most expensive circulated coin (the $2 coin) is so small and thick that people just don't hear it when it falls out of their pocket... even onto concrete. For this reason, it pays to detect here on the busier beaches and the surrounding estuaries. My wife has a great suggestion for the next time I return to the region which I won't give away here just yet. It involves some interesting thinking on her part. Will report back when I get around to it.
Cheers!
Marco
[size=small]Piled several layers thick for the Photograph, these are some of the hoard of Pre-Decimal Australian Pennies I found in the Blue Mountains.[/size]
THE BEACHES:[/size]
[size=small]Detectorist with the X-Terra 30 behind my wife - Taken in Hawaii in 2004[/size]
Well, the first thing worth pointing out here is that apart from being a continent, Australia is also the world's largest Island. We're literally surrounded by thousands and thousands of miles of beaches. The sand here near Sydney is so good, they've coated the beaches of Waikiki in Hawaii with it after the original Hawaiian beach sand was washed out to sea after a cyclone in the 70's.
Now I first came across real Metal Detectorists in Hawaii when I was a kid. I visited again in 2004 and watched the detectorists scouring the beaches after the sun set and can now identify the detector I saw as an X-Terra 30 (it had the red shaft) because I remember pointing it out to my wife and telling her how small they've become now that they were obviously electronic these days. You can actually see a detectorist in a picture I snapped of my wife above whilst relaxing with a cocktail on the beach side garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He was really swinging like crazy too. Each day after sunset, they'd appear on the beaches with headphones and boardshorts whilst slowly checking to see what the tourists had left behind for the day. Only now do I understand why the detectorists pocketed all dug targets immediately and without looking at them. I briefly wondered what it would be like to scour the beaches for people's 'left behinds' without realizing I'd be doing just that myself in another four years.
[attachment 82536 Xterra70Beach.jpg]
[size=small]With such a small population per capita, the Australian Beaches are a spectacular place to prospect. Freshly cooked seafood available nearby can make it a great day out. Remember to bring Sunscreen![/size]
So here I am back home in Australia. I visited the beaches above Sydney -where my parents have a house overlooking the water- and gave the X-Terra a quick test before moving further away from where the crowds were. The local Prospecting store told me I'd do better where the tourists and large families of Italians were find of sitting during the day. And that I should avoid the surfer-preferred locations because 'Surfers tend to leave their wallets & valuables in the car". Made sense to me. But with all the river inlets and literally thousands of choices within short distance from one another, I just had to see what was under the sand.
The X-Terra 70 was easy to use. Beach Mode makes it run stable on moister sands. I was mortified at how much sand managed to work it's way beneath the skid plate but I removed the plate when I got home and cleaned it all out again. Easy enough. I do dislike the amount of salt that builds up on my sunglasses and camera lenses though.
I found a lot of trash at first but the areas I was scanning have been used daily for a hundred years and so I found a vast variety of coins from American half-dollars & even Singapore coinage & Kiwi denominations... to strange tokens which were probably pre-WW2. The best thing was the amount of gold jewellery to be found. It started out with some high value targets which were single earrings and the odd silver chain. But it progressed to the point where I'd dug no less that 8 gold chains, one of which was 26grams and 18ct. Plenty of rings, some silver, most were 9ct gold with a small stone. A few bullet casings, lots of sinkers, fish hooks and plenty of alluminium cans.
Now there's a little known rule here that anyone finding gold has to turn it into the local police station for a period of about 60 days to allow anyone loosing it to claim it. The charge for not doing so is called (I kid you not): "Theft By Finding". For a few of the more expensive items, I did this. Most of it was small change and about $170 in $1 & $2 coins over a period of a couple of days.
With the long beaches here, it was easy to detect during the day although a lot of fishermen seemed to find it amusing to see me scanning the sand with my detector and spent their afternoon watching me rather than their fishing rods which were planted in the sand. That's a good reason to wear dark glasses when detecting in daylight hours: to enable me to watch the watchers. Most people were naturally curious though.
[size=small]here I am in a wider shot - what you can't see is the other direction from which I've just traveled: almost 3km of smooth beach sand.[/size]
I found the detector-beach-scoops handy. I bought a galvanized one from the local Prospecting store when I first purchased my X-70 but hadn't had a chance to use it until now. The holes are wide enough to release sand but are sufficiently narrow enough to trap all Australian coins. There's a lot of tourists visiting our beaches so this would seem to account for the large number of foreign coins littering some areas. Now I deliberately sought out beaches which I felt would likely not have been detected easily. And it seems they weren't!
[size=large]
THE MOUNTAINS:[/size]
Just a short while ago, my wife and some of her girlfriends met way up in the Blue Mountains to have 'High Tea' together at the old Colonial style hotel known as 'The Hydro Majestic'. This is an old hotel. Built in the 1800s (I think) and considered to be VERY haunted. As a photographer, I took a look at their vintage "ghost" pictures and believe them to be the result of the long exposure Vs people who can't stand still for a photograph (think of the pic of the detectorist above in the background on Waikiki Beach). Still, one guest in the distant past took time to dismember his female companion and bury her head in the grounds now occupied by the Tennis Courts (see below). One of our Prime Ministers (Barton?) died atop his mistress in one of the rooms and this has been hushed up until recently. A bell was installed and rung every Sunday Morning to warn the male occupants that their wives were approaching on the train at the turn of the last Century. A second station was constructed just a bit further ahead of the rail lines especially for the mistresses who could then board the train without having to run into the wives who would alight at the main station of Leura first. I'm told there was always pandemonium when the bell was rung in the 1920s.
[size=small]A small portion of finds over several days of relentless detecting on the beaches and in the Mountains near Katoomba.[/size]
I don't like people watching me arrive someplace with a detector because it usually gets tongues wagging and triggers unnecessary opinions and paranoia. So I had broken mine down and concealed it in a hiking pack before passing through the hotel and onto the track leading through the bush and down into the valley below. After a delicious lunch at the Hotel with my wife and her friends, I reassembled the X-70 when I was in the thicker bushland and proceeded to detect. This is NOT gold bearing strata and there was no need to use prospecting mode -as much as I would have loved to have found gold so close to my city! The Gold Fields are another hour or two West of here.
[size=small]The view South from the 'Hydro Majestic' hotel's Tennis Courts - overlooking the Valley.[/size]
[size=small]Some of the Modern coins I found, along with four .45 Caliber slugs and some shells of various calibers.[/size]
After digging several bullets and finding a few bottle caps and ring tabs, I stumbled upon a thick but disintegrating plastic bag which overloaded the detector. Inside it was a rotting canvas bag. It was beside the track and sort of jammed down between a large tree and the surrounding sandstone which formed an overhang. It was filled with large, Australian copper pre-decimal pennies and half pennies. (Our Pennies are the size of a US Silver Dollar) All coins were produced after 1941 but the plastic probably wouldn't have held out that long. I'm thinking someone may have found the original canvas bag and wrapped it in plastic before leaving it where it was because the corrosion was limited to what I would expect for a drier environment. Some coins near a hole in the bag were literally green and encrusted with corrosion but most (as you can see here) were in great condition.
[size=small]The Tennis Courts - As photographed from the same place that the shot above it (showing the valley) was taken.[/size]
Now talking about interesting finds: My last trip to the Hargraves Region yielded an interesting surprise nearly two weeks after I returned. I found an old Whiskey bottle which was uncorked and filled with chunks of dry dirt and leaves - none of which would come out. There was no sign of gold inside but the bottle looked old so I took it home. I spent about a week trying to soften and extract the soil from the insides and forgot about it until recently. The leaves proved to be the hardest to budge since they stuck to the inside wall of the bottle with the now-dry eucalyptus oils. But yesterday, I was able to fill the bottle with a semi-caustic solution and stand it upright in my ultrasonic tank to loosen the debris inside. The bottle started clinking and I poured out the contents to find a few small nuggets which someone had obviously stored inside it. It's about 4.5 grams worth. The first time I went prospecting, I came home with a tiny piece of gold cemented to my Pick Axe with red clay. Sure, it was tiny (think: 0.10g) .. but these things make it worth while and add to the random nature of Prospecting.
I'm not as driven to beach detect as I like to Prospect but it's certainly interesting. I dig far more junk than good targets in some areas. Lead sinkers are everywhere here. I went out again the other day and found nothing but junk again (if you don't count the corroded 5c coin I came across). I tried to use it to pay my toll on the freeway later but they wouldn't accept it. Someone said to me recently that our most expensive circulated coin (the $2 coin) is so small and thick that people just don't hear it when it falls out of their pocket... even onto concrete. For this reason, it pays to detect here on the busier beaches and the surrounding estuaries. My wife has a great suggestion for the next time I return to the region which I won't give away here just yet. It involves some interesting thinking on her part. Will report back when I get around to it.
Cheers!
Marco
[size=small]Piled several layers thick for the Photograph, these are some of the hoard of Pre-Decimal Australian Pennies I found in the Blue Mountains.[/size]