First hunt since last week, and went back to the place I called “the Plantation” in the last entry, where I found a merc last Wed or Thu.  Didn’t have much hope for the site, but a huge 2-300 year old estate recently becoming a park has some promise.  And besides, it was hot.  92 and humid.  Perfect.  We whine all winter about sub 70 temps; at least we rejoice when it is hot.  Bring it on.  Jack it to triple digits.  While the competition melts, the silver is mine.

Anyway, the problem with this site is that there are huge trees everywhere, and they are old and big, which means you can’t see bupkis on the aerials, so you have to kinda try to figure stuff out on the ground.  Last time I was here I just gridded out near the parking lot and found a merc, cause there wasn’t much else to do, especially since the whole place was overrun with kids, but today the kids were home out of the heat playing video games and whatnot, and the place was mine.

To my mind, the most promising place was a small patch of woods between one of the old buildings, and by an old pond.  What struck me about the woods was there were quite a few old growth trees consistent with others in the grassy areas of the site, and a lot of smaller trees, but no mid range trees.  Bingo.  Had to be a grassy area in the silver area, with nice slope right by the pond with good exposure and good shade trees.  Had to be where they hung out, and enough out of the box that it wasn’t hunted to death.

First target, 1940 nickel, one inch,  1970 penny, one inch.  1955 wheatie, one inch.  Are you kidding me?  Three good tells in 15 minutes.  I was in business.  Not only that, I was getting a lot of bottlecaps.  Bottlecaps may even be better than silver, cause its not about finding silver, its about finding silver sites, and when I find bottlecaps like this, it always ends well.

Oh my, that is a beautiful sight, and it doesn’t count the ones I left cause they were in roots or the ones that were bloody obvious (tip: use “sizing pinpointing” on the E-Trac to help make them bloody obvious).  (And of course we know how it ends, cause the title gives it away — if we did edits, we’d change the title to “Bottlecap Fest”, and this entry would actually really work, but I love posts with “trifecta” in the title, so here we are).

Anyway, soon after, a 12-46 which was obviously a silver, and out pops the rosie at 1 to 2 inches.  A little later on, a beautiful 12-45 to 47, and out pops a barber dime at three inches (it appears I scratched it, but I don’t remember doing so; was in a pile of roots).  Where’s the seated?; this place is old, and I actually solved it, for once.   Looking for the trifecta — give me a seated or a merc.  Near the end of the hunt, a 12-44 at 1 inch that was most certainly going to be a clad dime, and no one would have dug it in the grassy area, but stuff doesn’t sink in the woods (and there are reasons for this, maybe fodder for another day); at an old site in the woods, you dig everything, and was shocked to see the silver rim in the hole, and a 1943 merc (would have rather seen an older merc).  Why so low and sounding like clad?  — cause of the tarnish, not so apparent on the front, but brutal on the back.

But there’s more, at least I think there is, lets see if the bad stream of consciousness produces it.  The coins are ugly.  Coins in the woods tend to come out that way.  It must be the sap in the leaves, or something.  The reverse of that merc is a train wreck.

Also, its been said many times that barber dimes come in low, like 12-41 to 12-42.  Not always true, especially not in the woods.  Remember, TID is also a function of depth (the deeper, the lower), mineralization (the worse, the lower, especially at depth, as before), thinness (remember the expression “one thin dime”, may have been coined in the barber era, and may apply), and of course patina (more tarnish, lower TID).  I’m not sure why I wrote this paragraph, but no doubt there is a reason,  Maybe to confuse the search bots, or something.

But, what else?  Mosquitoes.  This was intended to be a whine free post (who could whine when pulling a trifecta?), but the mosquitoes were brutal.  And they were smart too, they only seemed to attack from the back, not from the front where you could see them and kill them.  Darwinism at work, for sure — the front attackers were killed by my predecessors for sure.  Now, Chester County isn’t known for mosquitoes, but this place was brutal, at least in the woods.  These silvers were well earned.

What else?  My assessment of this wooded section of the site is that it likely has never been hunted before.  Never seen so many bottlecaps and silvers in such a small area (50 by 25 feet), in a putative low density site (not a park in the silver era).  But, no quarters (clad or otherwise, either).  So, someone may have been thru, just someone without A class skill.  Just goes to show that its hard to grid out a section of woods, but, if you are meticulous (and what are the odds I spelled that one right on the first try?), you can get some.  Meticulous gridding when you’ve got good tells, no matter how difficult the terrain, is always the answer.

As for this site, the rest of the wooded section is to be tougher, given greenbriar and other annoyances, and it is rather small.  But, given how lightly the site appears to have been worked, if I don’t get a big fish in the greenbriar, I may have an outside shot at one in the grassy area.  We’ll see.

Total hunt time, 2 hours and 3 silvers.  We’ll take it.  But, there’s even more, but I think we’ve all been through enough of BSoCW for one day.  At least I actually finally nailed one.

Oh, and I now remember at least some of the “there’s more”.  The barber was silver #122 on the year, which is a milestone.  That’s how many I pulled in my first year with the E-Trac.  So, at least the decline isn’t so brutal yet to make this my worst ever year in my E-Trac era.