Gotta love “S” words in the subject line.  Tuesday’s entry, which I didn’t feel up to writing at the time, was gonna be called “Sounds of Silver Sites”.  Maybe I’ll work that entry in now.  In any case, lots of “S” words, only one we care about.

Today I went back to Tuesday’s site, which I was to write off pending the completion of one small zone in a very large site, and I continued to expand the grid in that zone.  The zone is in the very corner of a large park; the silver I found on Tuesday was 10 feet from one boundary, and less than one foot from the other.  As the zone gave up a couple of deep wheaties and clad, I figured it had a chance for more silver.

What I got today in that zone was a shallow 01-49/01-50 on the E-Trac that blew my ears off; these are almost always canslaws, and we often don’t dig ’em, but this one seemed a bit smaller, so I figured it had a chance to be a silver bling, like a big pendant or something.  Boy was I shocked to see a barely legal Q at just one inch.  Are you kidding me?  The state clad Qs at this site are 2-3 inches.  Glad I dug it.  Not really a natural find; could not have been in the ground more than 5 years.  Either was in normal clad change, or another detectorist dropped it, seem to be the most logical explanations.  We’ll take it.  Scanned the hole again, and found a pretty clean 1979 nickel, which also suggests a clad drop.

The only other thing to do at this site after working the small zone was to work an embankment along the edge of the site adjacent to the zone.  Embankments are really hard to work — you don’t know how much of it is the evil fill and grade twins, it is awkward to dig, swing, grid, and hard on your knees, and since the coins are usually at different angles than we are used to in flat terrain, TID can get whacked, meaning you have to dig it all, including clad dimes and pennies that may sound like silver (yuck!).  For these reasons, the competition often ignores embankments, especially along the edge, and thus good finds can be made there.

So, to make a long story slightly less long, I made a couple good finds on the embankment — a tarnished ’41 merc and a barely legal ’64 rosie.  The rosie was in some nasty roots, and took quite a bit of work to pop out, but it was fun to see that shiny.  Both were only at 3 inches, giving three shallow silvers today: 1 inch, 3 inches, 3 inches.  Silvers tend to be shallow on the embankments — its simple physics, they don’t sink at a straight angle to the plane of the embankment.  Also found 7 wheaties on this embankment, compared to 5 over the rest of the site, despite having spent 3 times the time in the rest of the site. I love embankments; I often get goodies there, and the competition seems to ignore them.

I don’t know about working in what I had planned to write on Tuesday.  It just seems like too much.  The bottom line is that the lions share of the site did not sound like a silver site.  Only one very small zone.  Its hard to describe, but its no threshold nulls, no chirps, no clad, no nothing, for hours.  Are you kidding me?  Silver sites have a certain sound, and it is noisy and complicated.  Only one small zone did, and the embankment, and that’s where the silver was.

So, despite pulling 4 silvers over 2 days from this site (which seems good, and it is), and having 98% of it left to do, I will just finish out the embankment and one small zone tomorrow, and farewell farewell it.  Seems harsh, but that is the way it sounds.  Someone is hunting it hard, or fill and grade have been here with virgin soil.  Who knows?  And too bad, as the site had promise.  Now I’m back in the same boat of looking for a new site.