Roadtrip to New England to work on a letterboxing project I agreed to do (which I ended up not being real motivated to do, in the end), but the ulterior was to test my big coil at a park I’ve been to a couple of times before, where the targets are really scarce, and really deep, but its also a place where I’ve gotten 2 reale Spanish silver.

But when I got there, this huge section had just been freshly mowed (this park is massively huge, BTW).  I don’t live in this area, of course, but I have been here a couple times previous, and hunted it with a couple locals, and I was fairly certain that this section certainly hadn’t been mowed this year before, and perhaps not for several years (and is rarely mowed), based on its look the last time I was there and conversations with the locals.

So, I focused there instead of the mowed area where I planned to test my coil, and in the somewhat little time I had, I got 9 wheaties, 1 silver, and about 10 bottlecaps.  The oldest wheaties are 1918 and ’19. Terrible ratios (I’m at about 2.38 wheaties per silver), but way more deep targets than the mowed section would have given up (in the same amount of time you might get 2 old coins, and not a chance at a deep bottlecap).

(As an aside to newbies — deep bottlecaps are the most valuable thing you can dig in a hunted out park outside of the silver itself — they are a tell that the section was not hunted hard in the 80s, when machines could not tell bottlecaps from coins (modern machines still have trouble with this as well, and at old sites, you have to dig ’em, cause they can be the more exotic silvers or coppers, and sometimes even a normal silver.  So, lots of deep bottlecaps are also a tell that it hasn’t been hunted well in modern times either, at least that has been my experience)).

As for the big coil in the hunted out section, I did not get a ton of time to test it, but I only found one deep conductive target, some sort of large copper washer, so its not like the deep coins were flying out of the ground with the big unit, and this was sort of the perfect test site — hunted out, and minimal mineralization as far as I can tell.  But, it was not a long enough test.