Yesterday back to the same site as the previous days, and gave equal time to the older section where I found the copper, and the graded section near the ball field where the modern silvers were.

Not much near where copper was except for a couple of wheaties, but scored a 1940 Q near the ball field.  Nice to get a silver other than a rosie this year.

It was under this rock, which isn’t a huge rock, but but you wonder how a coin dropped in the 50s sinks under a rock (that is literally older than dirt), at all.  Get a pot of dirt, put a quarter on it, put a rock 3 inches down directly under it, sit it on your kitchen table, and check it in 50 years.  Bet the quarter is still on the top.

But out there, the way coins (and rocks), move and shift around it amazing.  (I once found a wheatie directly under a 4×6 inch rock (1 inch thick) in an area I believe has never been disturbed).  Its not intuitive, but I have theories on why this happens.  And I also have theories on how understanding this (or at least thinking you understand it), can help your detecting.  I don’t have time to write it all up, but the executive summary is coins won’t sink as far in shady areas, and areas where the grass is old and unhealthy, and rocky areas.  My results bear this out — I do much better where the grass is weaker than where there is a thick, healthy carpet (part of the dynamic is the fact that grass decomposes to soil, earthworms, grubs, burrowing mammals, water/ice, and so forth play in the dynamic also.  All for another day).

One thing for today is more on noise cancel, tho. I can’t reiterate how important this is on the E-Trac (at least around here).  I went about 45 minutes yesterday without digging a single target.  Of course the site is sparse, and I do not like to dig, cause digging is expensive, but that was ridiculous.  I even dropped my digger over the coil to make sure the machine was still working.

Eventually I got a real crappy CO 27 to 37 at about 4 inches, not likely to be anything good, but I needed to dig something, and it turned out to be a wheatie at 4 inches, in decent shape.  Are you kidding me?  Got something similar nearby, this time I remembered to noise cancel, and it came in loud and clear, like it should.  Shifted back to the old channel, and it was a crap signal.  I know this stuff matters, but I haven’t seen such a stark case in a while, as I am usually pretty good about it.  Maybe it was something local to the site.

I usually noise cancel about 20-30 or so times a hunt, but I made a conscious effort to do so more often yesterday, including on each iffy target.  I probably NC’d about 40-50 times, and it helped.  I was hitting deep ones moreso than other days at the site (too bad they were all very deep clad.  Grrr) and dug more coins today than any other day here.  Now, who is to know it is not a shift in density?  You don’t without more scientific method outside the couple of targets I did do, but its not.  Noise cancel and channel management matters on the E-Trac.

Well, too bad I couldn’t turn it into a multi-silver day.  5 hunts here recently (6 overall), and just one silver each.  But, any silver day is a good day.