I did pull a silver today (a ’44 merc), so some would say the title is misleading, but its not like that.  Its a slump.  And, for control freaks, stat freaks, grind it out and force success freaks like me, its like that.

But hey, we’ll take it, silver coins are hard to find, and any hunt that produces one is a good hunt.

Today was back to the “old honeyhole” site of about a week ago, a site that has given up 66 silvers and a site I’d like to formally close, to work some edge sections, including a section that I think an old house was located in.  These rarely end well, cause the competition has been all over it since the the 70s, but it did give up some nice deep high tone tells, but no silvers.  Maybe the competition was leaving that stuff in the ground, who knows?

When my patience waned on the putative old house section, it was back to the hot zone section of the site for some careful low and slow gridding to see what I (and every joe schmoe since me) missed since 2011, and it was a couple of deep wheaties next to iron.  Are you kidding me?  I’m not paid enough to solve these deep, stupid, wheaties, and, at one point, I figured I’d just dug my 16th consecutive wheatie without a silver.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about a ratio killer.  I think my record on this stat is 17, so this is a pretty yucky streak.

Then, something amazing happened.  There was a edge of a silver dime poking out of the side of the hole.  What a sweet sight!  Woohoo.  I’ll never tire of that sight, and as rare as it has been lately, it is even sweeter.  One silver in 3.5 hours.  One more hunt to close this site, which I really haven’t dealt with since the spring of 2011, but I just wanted to see if my improved skill and improved unit would make a difference.  I don’t think it did.

BTW, at least this site had a nice auto rec, 24-26 range.  I’m noticing that this stat tends to run with the geography: Northern Chester County good, Southern/Western Chester County bad (there’s no “Eastern Chester County”, go figure).  The odd thing is that the last honeyhole I closed was in the bad section (and was the only good site I’ve ever had in that section); I think that had to do with the shallow bedrock at that site.  All of this stuff bears watching if one is worried about their efficiency, as of course all economists are.  Too bad all the good good section sites seem to be more or less hunted out — at least I can take consolation in the fact that I was the one who did it, for the most part.

Now what?  Same problem as last entry — the inevitable decline.  Tomorrow will be an abandoned old house site — I don’t like these sorts of sites, cause the competition has been hitting them since the 70s, but we’ll see how it goes.  Maybe it hasn’t been hit with an E-Trac yet.  We’ll see.