After that amazing midweek hunt of a barber half, 2 reale, large copper and about 10 wheaties, I expected a letdown, but it was more like a crash.

I obviously went back to that site, looking for more.  Wouldn’t you?  I didn’t have time to write about it at the time, but the site is a huge field, the sort of site you can detect for 6 hours, and not dig a single coin.  Well. that’s what happened, pretty much, over the next couple of days (actually I dug a half-decent buff, and a 1920 wheatie.  That’s it).  Amazing I dug those two big silvers before (it wasn’t total luck as one was beside where an old road was that I managed to figure out based on an old map and the noise — obvious tip: if you are field hunting, and get alot of noise all of the sudden, work that area harder; but the 2 reale was total random luck).

I also spent some time in the woods when it got really hot.  The woods are near an old swimming hole that gave up all those wheaties and a merc on that day, and they were not woods back in the day — so sometimes you can get some out of the box stuff in these situations.  Moreover, coins tend to not sink in the woods, so I pulled 2 wheaties, the earliest being a 1913, and another buff (dateless and abused; not shown).  No silver from this site tho.  The woods are a bit thorny, but I want to try to squeeze a silver out of them some other time.

Back in the field, I also dug this thing.  I thought it was going to be an old coin when it rang up, cause it was deep and had a nice sound.  But, it was this thing — I have no clue what it is, and to add insult to injury, it is not even silver.

So, two days without a silver, snapping my streak at 14.  Not bad, as these things go, but its rare that I have 2 skunks in a row.

Yesterday I had to take my son somewhere, and this is to a town that I swear the whole town is hunted out.  I have never pulled a single silver from several promising sites in this town.  But since I had to be there for several hours, I decided to hit a site I had hit once before, that I was sure was hunted out.  If I had a silver streak going, I prolly would not count this hunt.

But, I was surprised to find 3 wheaties over a 4 hour hunt.  Still hunted out, tho.  I will get a silver out of this town someday.  So, 3 hunts in a row without silver.  That hasn’t happened to me since March or April of 2011, I think. At least the hunts were all known low probability going in.

This morning I needed a fix, so back to a site that had been quite good, and I was hoping it had a bit more juice in it.  It was really too hot, and the ground too hard to be hunting, but it is so addicting.  I was skunked there too; all I could say is give me one damn rosie and I’ll go home.

So I went to the location of where there is all this dirt from dredging an old swimming hole; I had found some old coins near the swimming hole, and had high hopes for this dirt, and I had already found a couple of wheaties in it.  The problem with this sort of site is that it is even more rock hard than normal field or park grass/dirt, so I was saving it for after some good rain.

But, I needed a fix, so I hit it.  One thing that is interesting about hunting these sorts of tailings/scrapings/dredgings is that TID on the E-Trac doesn’t really work for some reason.  You can get a 12-44 an inch deep, and it be a silver.  That is always a clad dime in natural settings, and can safely be ignored.  And other TIDs tend to be wonky, and of course you can’t go by depth either.

Which means you have to dig all that clad cause you can’t tell, and there was tons of it.  All I could say was gimme a damn rosie and I’ll get out of this heat and rock hard dirt, and play board games with my family, or go play pinball or something.

I had high hopes for this dredging zone given how old the place it came from was, but it was just clad city.  I expected one silver for every 6 clads, based on a couple of assumptions (including the fact that I doubt it was ever detected), but it simply wasn’t to be.  Eventually I pulled the damn rosie and was out of there.

Well, that’s 4 hunts in one story.  A few wheaties, a couple of buffs, a rosie, and a whatchamacallit.  Due to the heat and the rock hard dirt, I don’t know how much digging I’ll be doing going forward, but fields and woods have some appeal, as the misery is mitigated somewhat.  We’ll see.