Should have waited one more day to post, and avoided yesterday’s totally lame post, cause today we can just as easily do the same, but at least I was able to detect today, and this one involves silver. Gotta love it, squeezing in the silver on the days you can.
Ground seemed to be thawing more, and as much as I am aching to get back to my 11 silvers on 1/31 site, I decided heading south or east was a good idea, and, given that I had errands in that direction anyway, in was the obvious choice for what was promising to be a mid 40s and sunny day, with thawed ground (at least in that direction).
Hit a site I last remember hitting in the fall of 2011. This site is a bit of a shrine for me, as it played a big part in my longest consecutive silver streak (52 hunts a row), and I remember one day scrambling for hours at this site to keep the streak alive, and pulled it out with a merc with just 10 minutes left before I had to get back to work. This is also the same town where I did 112 silvers in 17 days at a different site (and wrote it up for Minelab back in the fall of 2011), so the town is quite a shrine as well (that site ended up producing 140 silvers, and it is still not closed, tho it is probably mostly dead). Needless to say, it is by far my largest producing municipality. (Too bad I wasn’t blogging in those days; tho I did take copious notes and pics, and one day may write it up, but who has the time?).
Anyway, onto the detecting. I proceeded to build out from the grid I built in the fall of 2011, but seemed to be dying out, as it was going from more dense to low density sections, but experience tells us that even these low density sections have the occasional random silver.
The mineralization was tough. I could not get auto rec above 20. I don’t remember this being a problem in the past at this site, but I could be wrong. What I was getting was moderately deepish clads and wheaties (but no deep quarters) — deepish clad is usually a good tell. Deep clad quarters usually an even better tell. What this was telling me was that the big unit was getting deepish, small high tone targets that the competition was missing (the competition was obviously getting the deepish quarters), but, on the other hand, I was struggling to hit these targets (most of the signals were very iffy), and in fact, both the silver cross pendant and the merc and the clads were not extraordinarily deep (as these things go compared to other sites) — (tho I am certain the cross was on its side; not sure about the merc, cause I just pulled a deep pile of dirt onto my drop cloth, and there she was). (If you managed to parse that massive run on, congrats!).
What this all lead to was conflicting thoughts. Maybe I’m getting deeper stuff here that others missed. OTOH, I was struggling on the deep ones (that didn’t really seem that deep in an absolute sense), so maybe the smaller pro coil is a better choice at a consistently highly mineralized site than the big unit. It has never felt like an issue before, but it did today. Too bad I didn’t have both so I could swap out and test (not that I would have wanted to — I’m both lazy and impatient, but the scientist in me wants to get this right),
Anyway, today’s merc puts this as a 20 silver site. Not bad. Want to get back to my double digit site tho, so it may be a while before I’m back in this area. Unfortunately, weather looks foul going forward, so we’ll see what happens next.
Well, I didn’t nail this one, but at least it won’t require the traditional next morning edit.