After last Friday’s six silver/$1.00 hunt, it sometimes feels like you can do no wrong, but silver coins are still really hard to find, and it only takes a hunt like the last two I’ve had to remind me of that fact every day.

Yesterday, of course, back to Friday’s site (wouldn’t you?), working the grid in the same direction that I pulled the six silvers (in fact, the last rank produced both the walker and a rosie), but it was nothing but bupkis.  Are you kidding me?

FWIW, the way I work a site is that I start in the out of the box, edge sections, try to establish a few old coins/silvers there. then slowly grid out towards that central middle grassy area that is always dead.  The reason that central middle grassy area is always dead is cause newbies often drive up to the park, look at  that inviting area, dive in, get bupkis or a stray wheat, then get frustrated after an hour or two of nothing else, then go home, leaving the more out of the box sections untouched, so they end up seeming a bit less pounded.  Those nice beautiful middle grassy areas/where the ballfield is are so pounded and dead, and sometimes tend to defend old sites well.

But, its hard to tell beforehand where the boundary between out of the box and pounded land is, and this site has worked out quite differently.  The edge/out of the box sections were more or less dead, just enough to keep my interest (and in fact, a couple of coppers and a reale, which justified working an apparently dead site), and so I kept at it, and the closer I got to that beautiful obvious grassy middle/ballfield section, the more silvers I got!  Who am I to blow against the breeze? So, I figured press on for even more silvers, but It wasn’t to be.  Just proves I either happened to find the boundary between out of the box land and pounded land, or that I have no clue about what I’m talking about.  No question in my mind its a combination of the two.

In any case, Monday’s 5 hour hunt of expanding the grid past the 6 silver zone generated a total of 3 wheats.  I then called that huge promising zone in that direction as hunted out, and started gridding another direction, and pulled one more wheat.  4 wheats in 5 hours.  At least one of them was a rather nice 1910.  The sort of site many write off (and I would (and should) too), but I’ve pulled 19 silvers (including a reale and a walker), as well as a pair of coppers.  Just suggests that there may be a method to my madness.  The question is, how much juice, if any, does this site have left?

Today wasn’t the day to find out.  Hit a new site that another detectorist suggested I hit (and that rarely ends well — would you tip your honeyhole?), but I decided to give it a go anyway, mostly cause it was in the direction of an area I wanted to scout anyway, and cause it was in a township that has given up manyilvers in the past (and I’ve found tracking silvers by township/municipality has worked really well).

Drove up to the site and almost had a heart attack.  Said to myself it was 25 to 35 silver site, based on my experience.  But it was not to be.  Knew after 30 minutes that the site was dead.  Dead sites and silver sites have their own sound.  This site had a dead site sound.  No trash.  Clean threshold.  Auto rec at 28. You know the drill.  Dead site sound.

Prolly a 5 to 10 silver site, and given it size, maybe a 1 per 4 hour site.  Did get a rosie and 6 wheaties in 2.5 hours, which doesn’t seem bad, but its a dead site.  Consider the rosie a hard won victory. Maybe will go back and reassess next year, when and if they mow the grass (one problem was that it is an abandoned schoolhouse, with unmowed grass, which disrupted my grid it out/low and slow/partition the site method, which maybe has biased my assessment). My rule is only write off a site after two substantial hunts without silver, but sometimes you just know, and in this case, I just do (or at least I think I do).

So, 7.5 hours of hunting over the past 2 days nets a single rosie and 10 wheats.  It seems lame to post a single rosie, but it isn’t.  It always serves to remind us all how extremely difficult it is to find silver coins in the game, and that cannot be stressed enough.