Lots goin’ on here tonite.  I feel one of those “story” posts coming, but I think it’ll be all good.  We’ll see.  Lets roll it.

Back to the honeyhole of recent entries was the plan — to regrid from a different angle the extreme 2 per hour hot zone, as we started to last hunt.  Weather was rainy, and as I pulled out of my driveway, it started to pour.  Almost turned around, but its a half hour drive, so maybe it would clear.  It did, just as I got there.  Day was actually nice for a change.

So, first, check this out, heart pounding tone coming in as a beautiful 09-48 at 8 inches.

Lucky Mo-Jo.  GOOD LUCK.  Are you kidding me!  “GOOD LUCK” would have been a SLQ.  “Lucky Mo-Jo” would have been another old timer’s silver half.  Its not even a copper.  Its an effen token with a hole in it.   Silver halfs come in at 3-5 inches at this place, and I dig 8 inches for some Lucky Mo-Jo.

But its cool in its own right.  Check this out.  It never ceases to amaze me what people put on the Internet, and what you can find out there, with just a few clicks of a mouse.  Some dude actually has a blog with scans of a vintage catalog with all sorts of snake oil and whatnot for sale, and this thing is in there —

The full blog post is here, but its very pic heavy.  Its basically a scan of the whole catalog.  Is that catalog cool, or what? As near as I can tell, this thing is from the ’30s or ’40s, which would be consistent with the other coins I’ve dug here.  Hopefully, it will bring me some Lucky Mo-Jo, but I wonder if it brought its original owner such, and how the lodestone and John the Conqueror root worked out for him.

But hey, its cool to kinda think about the person who carried and lost this, in the context of the place, what their life was like, getting such a catalog in the mail and spending a buck’s worth of silver for this stuff, (which could have been lost instead for me to find), and so forth, but lets move on (oh, and as an aside, I had no idea “mojo” was current in the 30s.  I thought it was a more modern borrow.  One more thing to research).

Anyway, onto the silver, and hoping I would have some lucky mojo on that front, going over an area I had already done.  This is the first time I have ever done this to a serious degree, and I was curious how it would go.  On the one hand, you want to find lots of silver, cause you always want to find lots of silver, but that would prove you sucked the first time.  OTOH, you don’t want to find any, cause that would prove you have some skill at working a site, but not finding silver sucks.

My goal was to simply go slow and carefully from a different angle to see what I had missed.  It was sort of an experiment; given that it was such a hot zone, and I had previously found 2 silvers in this section after I had already supposedly finished it. It seemed worthwhile.

And I ended up finding 3 silver dimes and 10 wheaties (the oldest being a 1919), as well as 2 deep clad quarters and the mojo token.

Not bad, or not good, depending on how you look at it.  The first silver was sort of straightforward, could be clad, could be silver, could be a wheatie, but I was pretty sure it was a silver before I dug it.  Other than the somewhat ambiguous TID, there was nothing hard about this one, and I should have gotten it the first time.

The second one was one of the toughest silvers I’ve found in a while.  In all honesty, it may have been a benefit of experiment bias.  It was a deep, iffy, iron false sort of signal, often the sort of thing I don’t dig, as it didn’t pinpoint great, but the second time around, when targets are thin, you may be more likely to dig it.  This was a dime at approximately 7 inches, I’m guessing. with a large piece of iron.  I may not have even heard the dime, just the iron, and got lucky.  As it worked out, I’m diggin’ diggin’ down for this thing, and it seems way deeper than it should be, and I check the tailings on the dropcloth, and there it is.  The thing I was actually going for was the iron hunk, after I had already pulled the silver out unknowingly.  Note to newbies — be aware of this possibility.  It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes what you think is the primary target, may not be, and the good target could always be in the tailings or the plug.  Its part of my protocol to always check this when I think the target is too deep.   In any case, I don’t feel bad about missing this one the first time.  We just had alot of rain, and many other factors could have been different as well.

The third one was a unique experience, and also may be a bit biased.  I hit a shallow canslaw, a big one, and those things sound awful and obvious on the E-Trac, and are easy to ignore, so no doubt I heard it the first time thru.  But this time I thought I heard the sweet sound of silver in the racket.  Was certain there was a silver quarter in there as well.  Couldn’t separate it, but I felt I heard it.  Pulled the canslaw, rescanned, and there it was, a barely legal 64 rosie.  Amazing.  It wasn’t directly under it, but it was close, a little off to the side.  Don’t think I’ve ever found one affected by a huge canslaw before.

As for the wheaties, I expected some, as I generally don’t dig ’em unless they are iffy, but most of these were iffy.  So I missed 10 wheaties, 3 silvers, 3 others the first time, at least that I know of.  In addition to the rain, I do know that when I first started at this site, and I believe the first day and second day in this zone, I was using the pro coil and not the ultimate 13.  So, as an experiment, in terms of controlling variables and whatnot, this doesn’t come close to qualifying, but interesting nonetheless.

Total hunt time today was 5 hours, so it was still not a bad run rate.  Original silvers in this zone was 33, plus 3 more today, and 2 on other days when I thought I was done, for a total of 38.  According to Google Earth, the area is about 100×200 or about half an acre (the site is at least 50 acres, and goes much faster, and much as been written off, and accounts for 26 silvers).  Of course, it was alot faster working it the second time, less targets, and you knew the bounds of the hot zone.  Imagine the run rate you could get if you knew up front exactly where the boundaries are.

So, as an optimization/economic problem, I’m prolly very unlikely to rework a zone of a site I’ve been over carefully, unless it is really dense, and really hard (where there may be benefits from seeing it from a different angle), as this one was.  But, it worked out for me in this case — I’m glad I did it, and glad I took these notes for future reference.

Anyway, enough data, lets see them dimes all shiny’ed up, so I can test this auto gallery update thing.  My hope was to find just one silver coin today, so I can test that live for the first time.  Here goes — we’ll see this pic and Lucky Mo-Jo in the gallery if all goes well.  If not, I’ll be hacking code all night rather than watching basketball.