Oh my, here comes a story like no other I’ve done.  We’ll see how it goes.  JK Rowling suggests that the wand finds the wizard (forget the fact that everything she has done is so obviously derivative that crediting her seems silly).  Neuropsychologists suggests that the words find the tongue (cf, Dennett, Daniel, for the best work on this subject).  Lets hope the story finds the writer, but I’m zero optimistic that that has happened (but at least it may provide some much needed humor).  So, here goes.

But, as much as I love the opening paragraph, it just ain’t gonna happen today, and that’s too bad, cause it was good.  I was gonna talk about dreams within dreams, and even use the word oneironaut for possibly the first time in a metal detecting blog.

But, today was just rough in the end, so I’ll just post the finds and go to bed.

Didn’t get out much past Monday’s 11 silver blowout, mostly cause its the last week before school.  Got out yesterday, to clean up the 20% of the pond dredge I’d written about in past entries (and was skunked), then went to a new site for some soundings (and was skunked); site has some potential, but is low on the list.

Got out today and did a bit better.  Day didn’t start out well — the site I wanted to hit was an old honeyhole that had given up 127 silvers, and I wanted to give my 13 inch unit a spin on the site to see what I missed in the past, but the site was in use in one hot section, and overgrown in the other (tho the good news is that they were mowing).  It did leave me to believe why I had such success at that site tho, perhaps it is overgrown most of the time, and I hit it when it was not.

So, onto the backup site, which is one of my shrines, the site I got my 500th silver at last year.  Was giving up less than bupkis, but eventually I hit a deep 12-30 on the E-Trac, and at a site with no targets, you dig everything.  All I could think of while I was digging was what silver could be at 12-30, and the only possibility (in US money), is a trime, but it seemed too deep for that.  What other coins?  Only a $5 gold at that number.  Good luck with that. We hoped.  We prayed to all the gods we can count, and it did turn out to be gold, an 18K wedding band at 8 inches.  We’ll take it.  No question in my mind that it is old (I’ve dug IHs and coppers shallower at this site, and besides, 18K for a wedding band went out a long time ago, tho I don’t know when).

Gold is awesome, but those who read my blog know its about only three things, the shiny, the AG, and the silver (notice the order of the title words of this entry).  And it wasn’t happening at this site, so I moved on. (gold is circumstantial; silver is systemic).

Moved on to perhaps the most difficult site to pull silver in Chester County; it frustrates me time and time again, but it was there, and on the way to the supermarket.  And besides, I wanted to test my big 13 inch unit at this site.  And I did pull a silver dime, and I was pretty excited about that, cause it was the clearest silver signal I’ve ever gotten at this site.  Not sure if it was the new coil or not (we can only hope), but will take that 54 rosie.

Will this new coil open up hard, hunted out sites?  I hope so, but I’m not terribly optimistic.  Despite the hunted out nature of Chester County’s hardest silver site, that rosie was not particularly deep.  So who knows?

Scored my 3rd double digit day of the year, and 13th of my career.  Double digit days are better than s^H, well, better than a good day at work.

This is a new site, a large door knocking site.  The good news is that I got permission.  The bad news is that I got it for only today.  Are you kidding me?  I’m no Goes4Ever sort of door knocking god, but I’ve done a fair bit of it, and the experience is either, “get lost”, or “no problem, come whenever you want”.  Who says “yes, but only for today”?

My guess is that it is someone who wants to say no, but doesn’t want to to your face, so they say no in general, but yes to your face.  Who knows?  Said the land had other users, and it would not be appropriate for me to be there when they were there.  What? So I says what about other days when said users are not there?  He didn’t want to deal with it, and I felt even my day was at risk at that point, so I thanked him and moved on.

And I went as long as could on the day, and dropped 11 silvers.  Site looks good.  Too bad only the nighthawks and others of questionable ethics will get the rest of the shiny.  Knowing me, I’ll grow a beard and be back in a month.  We’ll see.  But you take what you can get in this world, and double digit days are sweet indeed.  All the silvers are bulk; the oldest is a 1923 merc.

Also scored a pair of silver blings, a sterling heart charm and an abused ring.

I managed to score a merc during this morning’s three hour hunt.  Also scored a sterling religious charm.  Both were in the dredgings of the swimming hole I wrote about in the past, and both are therefore a bit tarnished from sitting at the bottom of a pond for 80 years.  The merc is a 1926.

Only 3 silver coins from this zone, I expected more.  There is still about 20% to go; I’m not sure if I will ever get to it or not.  We’ll see.

Friday is farewell, farewell day, and I am pretty much farewelling my latest site.  Not a bad site, but I actually found a bit less than I expected there.

The hunt did not start off well.  I started by finishing off a zone in the woods near an old swimming hole, where I had found some wheats and a buff, but outside of a couple more wheats, all I found was a yellow jacket nest.  Ouch!

I was stung 6 times, and yeah, I ran out of there, almost jumping in the pond.  They sting for a few hours, then they start to itch. And they still itch (I’m actually writing this Sun AM).

And the hunt didn’t get much better.  No silver, just one more wheat.  Farewell farewell day is often like that — you obviously hit the most promising locations first. Many zones left unexplored at the site, but there is so much fill and grade, that it didn’t seem worth it.  I did pass thru these here and there tho, just to be sure.

The site gave up 36 silvers, which is a bit less than I expected.  There was an old ballfield that I expected 15 or 20 from alone, based on past experience and the clad and wheaties it was giving up, but it only gave up 1.  This was the zone of “Reason X” from previous entries.

The site had about 30 zones or so, but only one of them gave it up in bulk, giving up 19.  No other zone gave up more than three.  Go figure.  The site has been hit hard (probably without permission, as 2 detectorists without permission showed up while I was there), but why didn’t they hit this one zone?  It was a rather obvious potential hot spot.  Who knows?

Were it lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality, giving up 2 barber halves, a walker, and a 2 reale.  These are all tough coins, unless your honeyhole is Ebay 🙂  It also gave up 11 coppers, which is alot for a site, including an 1808 half cent, and 1800 large cent.  The latter two are abused, but still made my top 30 finds list, as did the 2 reale of course.  It was a very nice site in the end.

The one thing I will say, tho, is that I spent way too much time in this large, non-descript field.  That field gave up both a barber half and a 2 reale in the same hunt, in a fairly quick span of time.  I figured the odds were good that some more old coins would pop out, but hour after hour of gridding this huge field produced nothing but some wheaties and a buff.  But I think you have to try.

In retrospect, I think I was in a bit of denial.  The barber half was ferrous affected, and by the location of an old road thru the field that I figured out the location of from old maps, and the 2 reale was deep and on its side.  Both are tough technical finds, and the one is a circumstantial find, thus leading me to over estimate the potential of the field.  It had been pounded hard in retrospect (the lack of coppers, buttons, and buckles in this zone gave this fact away), but after 2 killer finds, you feel the need to press on despite this evidence.  Not a great decision in retrospect, but it was fun nonetheless.

Well, I have 3 free hours this Sun AM, and I am going to take one more pass thru a zone that I failed to complete.  Hopefully one more silver will pop out, but I am not optimistic.

I fought my back issue Tuesday and Wednesday to detect a bit.  Was skunked on Tue, but it was an old field, an all or nothing site.  Wed was closer to a zone that had given up the goods in the past, and closer to an old building.  I did not recover many targets in this zone, but got a deep silver quarter (it was in a wet zone, and you can see later in the post how years of mush and standing water have abused it), and a rather nice copper for Chester County in a drier section, an 1800 draped bust large cent.

It is still abused, of course, but does have full liberty and some hair detail.  If you can believe it, it is one of the best coppers I have ever dug, and will likely earn a low spot on my best finds list.  It is also my 20th copper of year, a personal record.  It came in at 11-45 on the E-Trac, and was only 4 inches deep.   It was right on the edge of the site, near a road.  Often you can get coins others have missed near the edge of zones.  (This is a private property site which I have permission to detect, but during my time here, two other detectorists have come on the property without permission.  I may blog about that someday, and the lack of ethics in the hobby in general.  We’ll see).

Speaking of which: Last Sunday’s hunt, mentioned Monday, was a scam.  I wrote a long story Tuesday about it on how I used economics to work it out about an hour in, and then was lucky enough to see three pieces of physical evidence to confirm it.  I pulled the story, cause a), it sucked, b) it was was too long, and c) the whole thing really isn’t worth ink or server space.  I guess I’ll leave Monday’s stub up, which was put up instead of a story to see if others would work it out as well.  I’m happy to report that at least 2 others did.  The coolest thing about this, tho, was it was really cool to get a real life puzzle to work out.  I guess that was the find of the day for me.

Went to a group hunt with some other SE PA folks yesterday.  The site was some old fields and woods.  I did not expect to find much at such a site, and was not disappointed on that score, finding only an abused Indian head and a 1917 wheatie.  I think about 4 or 5 silver coins were found by 20 guys over 4 or 5 hours, so I should not feel disappointed on that score. Had a good time anyway tho, and it was nice to meet up with some old friends.

Sadly, however, I strained a muscle in my back, and it is pretty bad, so I may be grounded at home for a while, with minimal detecting, at least for the near term.  We’ll see, and lets hope not.

Not much detecting this week, but got out a couple of times.  Pulled a barely legal rosie the other day from the site of the pond dredging I wrote about last time, and today pulled 3 silvers, the quarter from the pond dredging dirt and two dimes from another zone, as the dredge dirt, while it gave up a few silvers, was slow going, and I needed a change.

You can see how sitting in the water all those years affected the two from the pond dirt.  The one other rosie is pretty beat as well, tho.

One other hunt was an excavated site that I had never been to before; I wasn’t sure what to expect, but in the past I have done very well at an excavated site.  This site was a skunk, tho, as the excavation was too deep (about 12 inches, and I didn’t find a single coin that deep).  I hit the tailing piles for a bit, and did find a few coins, including a wheatie, but no silver.  Site seemed pretty hunted out, tho I did get some very deep clad in the non-excavated section, so perhaps there is hope.

Also today dug a 1915D wheatie, which fills a hole in my dug wheatie album.

After that amazing midweek hunt of a barber half, 2 reale, large copper and about 10 wheaties, I expected a letdown, but it was more like a crash.

I obviously went back to that site, looking for more.  Wouldn’t you?  I didn’t have time to write about it at the time, but the site is a huge field, the sort of site you can detect for 6 hours, and not dig a single coin.  Well. that’s what happened, pretty much, over the next couple of days (actually I dug a half-decent buff, and a 1920 wheatie.  That’s it).  Amazing I dug those two big silvers before (it wasn’t total luck as one was beside where an old road was that I managed to figure out based on an old map and the noise — obvious tip: if you are field hunting, and get alot of noise all of the sudden, work that area harder; but the 2 reale was total random luck).

I also spent some time in the woods when it got really hot.  The woods are near an old swimming hole that gave up all those wheaties and a merc on that day, and they were not woods back in the day — so sometimes you can get some out of the box stuff in these situations.  Moreover, coins tend to not sink in the woods, so I pulled 2 wheaties, the earliest being a 1913, and another buff (dateless and abused; not shown).  No silver from this site tho.  The woods are a bit thorny, but I want to try to squeeze a silver out of them some other time.

Back in the field, I also dug this thing.  I thought it was going to be an old coin when it rang up, cause it was deep and had a nice sound.  But, it was this thing — I have no clue what it is, and to add insult to injury, it is not even silver.

So, two days without a silver, snapping my streak at 14.  Not bad, as these things go, but its rare that I have 2 skunks in a row.

Yesterday I had to take my son somewhere, and this is to a town that I swear the whole town is hunted out.  I have never pulled a single silver from several promising sites in this town.  But since I had to be there for several hours, I decided to hit a site I had hit once before, that I was sure was hunted out.  If I had a silver streak going, I prolly would not count this hunt.

But, I was surprised to find 3 wheaties over a 4 hour hunt.  Still hunted out, tho.  I will get a silver out of this town someday.  So, 3 hunts in a row without silver.  That hasn’t happened to me since March or April of 2011, I think. At least the hunts were all known low probability going in.

This morning I needed a fix, so back to a site that had been quite good, and I was hoping it had a bit more juice in it.  It was really too hot, and the ground too hard to be hunting, but it is so addicting.  I was skunked there too; all I could say is give me one damn rosie and I’ll go home.

So I went to the location of where there is all this dirt from dredging an old swimming hole; I had found some old coins near the swimming hole, and had high hopes for this dirt, and I had already found a couple of wheaties in it.  The problem with this sort of site is that it is even more rock hard than normal field or park grass/dirt, so I was saving it for after some good rain.

But, I needed a fix, so I hit it.  One thing that is interesting about hunting these sorts of tailings/scrapings/dredgings is that TID on the E-Trac doesn’t really work for some reason.  You can get a 12-44 an inch deep, and it be a silver.  That is always a clad dime in natural settings, and can safely be ignored.  And other TIDs tend to be wonky, and of course you can’t go by depth either.

Which means you have to dig all that clad cause you can’t tell, and there was tons of it.  All I could say was gimme a damn rosie and I’ll get out of this heat and rock hard dirt, and play board games with my family, or go play pinball or something.

I had high hopes for this dredging zone given how old the place it came from was, but it was just clad city.  I expected one silver for every 6 clads, based on a couple of assumptions (including the fact that I doubt it was ever detected), but it simply wasn’t to be.  Eventually I pulled the damn rosie and was out of there.

Well, that’s 4 hunts in one story.  A few wheaties, a couple of buffs, a rosie, and a whatchamacallit.  Due to the heat and the rock hard dirt, I don’t know how much digging I’ll be doing going forward, but fields and woods have some appeal, as the misery is mitigated somewhat.  We’ll see.