Well, after finding a 4 reale which could not be verified, and a chain cent that could barely be verified, both stunning rarities if even in passable condition, the universe continues to mock my every move.

Hit a couple of new sites, and a trusty old one that has produced 20 silvers including a nice seated quarter, and pretty much got skunked.  Yesterday’s hunt in particular was quite frustrating, as I thought it was a nice out of the box area that would reward my research and powers of observation, and I was hitting tons of bottlecaps.

Unlike most, I absolutely love finding deep bottlecaps.  They almost always sound like old coins, so everyone has to dig them.  Moreover, lots of bottlecaps means the site was not hunted well in the 80s or 90s, an era when machines couldn’t tell them apart.  They show the site was not detected very hard.

When I find bottlecaps, I usually find silvers in greater numbers

But, these bottlecaps were insidious.  They were big, and sounded like deep silver quarters and half dollars.  They were about 10/11 inches deep in rock hard soil.  Moreover, there was not a lick of a breeze, so it was on the hot side, and the gnats were brutal with no wind to keep them down.

And not a single coin, outside a few pieces of clad.  Not even a wheatie.  My guess is that the evil Fill & Grade twins had visited the site sometime in the past, as the bottlcaps seemed deep for their apparent age, and the machine likely would not have heard dimes and pennies at that depth (there was also 2 inches of grass on top).

Oh well.

One site did produce a lone silver quarter, so it wasn’t a total skunkfest, but that site is so overgrown with grass, only a fraction of it is swingable.