I generally don’t like to write about failed hunts (but I at least mention them so people don’t get the idea I get silver every time out), but I’m in a really grumpy mood, and this one hunt was rather remarkable.  And besides, there are only so many ways to write “dug silver today”, and as readers well know, they get more and more bizarre and lame.

Anyway, I got for a rare weekend hunt on Sunday, to an old abandoned mansion site that is slated for demolition to build offices condos or some such.  Its at least 200 years old, and has huge trees, a mowed lawn, a few outbuildings, and so forth.  A dream site really; very similar to the old colonial mansion I was hitting a few months ago where I pulled a dreamy 2 reale, 1875 IH, and a couple of other silvers and coppers (I still have to update my best finds section with those).  The sort of site that has been hunted to death, but if you keep at it, you usually get something, and may even get a big fish.

But, at this site, I did not find one single coin in 3.5 hours of detecting.  Are you kidding me?  Not even a silly zincoln or other clad.  Unbelievable.  And, I believe the site was occupied to at least 2011.  How could a site be so hunted out?  And I tried everything — every paradigm, careful gridding, and so forth.  Never seen that before.  Even at abandoned houses in the woods where there is very little swing area, and it is really tough, I usually snag a wheatie or two.  How could there not be a single coin?  I guess its a good thing that the competition doesn’t bother with the sorts of sites I usually do, which have given up over 1100 silvers.  Go figure.  (And fill and grade weren’t the culprits, as there were plenty of old trees to verify the grade).

I figured maybe my machine or coil was bad.  The only nearby site was an old field which is very sparse in targets, having given up only a 1 reale, old silver ring, and about half a dozen musket balls.  Even in that field, after about an hour, I found a couple of clads.  Machine seemed fine.

One reason I thought the coil might be bad was because, at both sites, I was getting alot of low tone falsing, stuff in the 01-02 range.  This was exactly what happened when the coil went bad the last time.  But, I wasn’t getting that when I held it in the air like I was then.  Must have been something weird at both sites, as it went away at the next one.  One thing I did notice was that as I lowered the channel number. I got less of it.  I had always observed that channel 11 was a bit noisy in this way, but never realised there appeared to be a linear correlation between channel number and noise.  I’m no engineer, but that would imply a linear relation between the frequencies it is listening for (and hence sending), and channel number.  I had always figured that there was no correlation based on the observation that good channel number performance seemed random.  Who knows how these things work?  I certainly don’t, but my noise cancel strategy, articulated elsewhere, does work, so WDIK?

Tuesday I again got to the site of recent entries to close it out, and it was once again miserable.  Its just hard to describe, but pretty much every swing produced a high tone, generally some big trash.  Canslaws, sheet metal, long pieces of metal, copper piping, and so forth.  Never seen even close to this density of this stuff at a park.  Why is it all there?  Why so much copper pipe, for example, in the ground at a park?  And, you have to dig alot of it (in rocky ground no less), cause sometimes it is big silver objects; witness the intact pieces of silverware dug here.

But, I had enough.  It wasn’t fun.  There wasn’t much of the site left, but I closed it out without finishing it off.  5 silver site, all modern, and 3 silverwares, 2 intact.  We’ll take it, cause silver coins are hard to find.