Finally got out to do a little coil testing, to the site where most of April’s silvers have come from.  The idea was to go over the area I had gridded out in 2011 with the pro coil, this time with the Ultimate 13, and, if I got an iffy signal, swap out the coils to see if I could hear the target with the pro coil.  Then, if I had time, I would reverse the experiment and lead with the pro coil.  I wanted to see if I could find evidence that the Ultimate 13 was deeper, by maybe finding a silver I missed in 2011.

I didn’t.  In fact, the test really didn’t show any material difference between the coils in terms of depth, which I define as simply giving a signal I would feel like digging (and I don’t like to dig, so it has to be a decent repeatable signal with tight pinpoint, and that “bounce”).  Of course, its hard to get a deep iffy signal in the first place, and its also hard to control for all variables, such as sweep speed, channel, positioning, and so forth (each coil seemed to like different channels on the same dirt, which makes sense, cause each is actually seeing different dirt).

If anything, the pro coil gave better ID at depth, which surprised me, as past anecdotal and statistical evidence seemed to suggest the opposite (and I know I have claimed that in the past), this is of course why you try to do controlled experiments if you can.  When you think about it, this makes sense, as I had one target that came in as an 11-47 on the big unit, and a 12-43 on the pro coil.  It was right next to a hunk of iron (you could hear the null), and the big unit is seeing more of the iron and adding it in than the smaller coil.  Separation was fine with both tho, but the pro coil was right — it was a penny.

One other signal was an iron that the big unit gave me a 50/50 silver/iron, and the pro coil was pretty sure it was iron.  But, had it been a silver, would the big unit have been right?  Maybe.  I think it is a more aggressive coil, enticing me to dig some of these, and sometimes they work out.

The big unit, of course, has better width, and this is actually important, if you can’t keep a tight, overlapping grid.  You could be off quite a bit with this coil and still hear the target; with the pro coil, I had to be pretty much on top of it, and this may be its big advantage, even if depth and TID at depth aren’t really proven.  You can work a site more efficiently and faster with the big unit.

Obviously, the pro coil was quieter.  There was no material difference in the auto rec, so I imagine mineralization affects them about the same.  As I said, they each wanted different channels, and I did lots of channel testing with each one, what it wanted, what the other wanted, on the same target, and so forth, and when the big unit wanted channel 7, couldn’t hear the target at all.  Of course, we know channel 7 is a crap channel, but it doesn’t hurt to keep being reminded that keeping an eye on channel matters.  In fact, which channel I was on made more of a difference than which coil I had on.

I got bored of doing the tests, and eventually just decided to expand the grid into undetected sections of the site, working off where I found a silver Q last time I was here.  I happened to have the pro coil on, and nailed a merc.  This is a brutally mineralized section (the auto rec can go as low as 10 here), and it was a tough signal; a choppy 10-47 that easily could have been mistaken for an iron target,  It was like 4 inches deep, and I figured it was a clad Q.  Would have been nice to see how the big unit reacted to this merc, in hindsight, but I was too burnt out by that point on the test.

Well, I still like the big unit, even if I can’t prove it is deeper.  I think I do better with it than I do with the pro coil.  I can see so many flaws in the experiment that I’m not sure it was worth doing, but it was fun anyway until I got burnt out swapping them (and it is pretty easy with a duplicate shaft; I wouldn’t bother if I had only one set of hardware, tho).  You can’t draw conclusions from a test that involved less than 10 targets, none of them really deep and iffy, at least in the less mineralized section.  There’s more I could write about better experiment design (which would involve a more long term, statistical approach), but I’m tired, so that’s that.

I didn’t expect to get out much over the last few days, but I did squeeze in a 4 hour hunt today at a place I call “the shrine”, cause that’s where I found my 500th YTD silver coin in 2011.  I haven’t been back there in a while, cause all that is left is this huge middle section that seems ultra dead, but I did pull a gold ring and a copper out of this section in the past, and have never used the big unit there, so why not?

The thing about this site is that there is lots of high tone trash on the edges for some reason (its alot of copper scrap — not sure why it is here, never seen anything like it anywhere else), and not much low tone trash (not that constant din of foil and pulltabs like you get at a normal park), but there are alot of deep mid tones, so you can end up digging a little bit of different stuff rather than being singularly focused on that one sound we all know and love so well.

Which, sadly, I simply did not hear today.  One of the deep mid tones was a toasted 1888 IH (which actually doesn’t look too bad when wet in a close up pic (like so many other things in life), but of course we’d rather have a ’64 rosie).  It came in at CO 30 on the E-Trac.

The best find of the day, tho, was this leaden toy soldier (boy I love when you can drop into Middle English and legitimately inflect those adjectives; there are only a few you can still do that with — for homework, think of the others, or try learning a language where all adjectives are routinely inflected.  Yikes!  English speakers don’t realise how easy English is to learn to speak (English spelling, however, is a different kettle of fish)).  Anyway,  the toasted IH is there just for size reference; it would look slightly better in a close up pic (but not much). (As if my stubby fingers wouldn’t suffice for reference).

I don’t know how old the damn thing is.  I don’t usually get excited about relics, but this one is kinda cool (and, of course, if you are incapable of pulling silver on the day, you have to trump something up to make the hunt look cool; I’m sorry, abused IH’s just don’t cut it for me — I don’t care how old they are).

But, I like it.  I’ll try to find out how old it is, if I’m bored.  I rarely get relics, so it is certainly one of my better ones.  Just a couple of notes on it — at the end of the gun is what appears to be a sickle.  Also, it won’t stand up straight.  I don’t know if that is a manufacturing defect with its base, or years in the ground have warped the base.  Too bad.  Would look kinda cool standing on my office window.

Back to yesterday’s site and pulled a 3rd silver coin from this site, a 62 rosie.  Sounded like silver, pulled it, looked like clad, rubbed the date, looked like 1969, rubbed again, looked like 1962.  Whohoo!  We’ll take it.  Silver coins are hard to find, especially at this place.

The trick to this place is slow and meticulous gridding (which, I believe, is the trick at most places).  But, I think the place is played out.  Its seated era old, but a challenge to pull even surface clad (except for that walker, which remains an unexplained anomaly), and besides, meticulous gridding is hideously boring at this place.  At least give me some deep, affected clad that sounds like silver to dig and gets the heart racing and all those other primal juices flowing.

FWIW, I’m overloaded with work and chores now, so the next post will likely be next week.   I guess the silver will have to wait.  Too bad.

Always a nice title.

Friday’s Hunt

First, a little about Friday’s hunt; I did have a really overly long and baroque writeup, even  for me, if that is possible, but it sucked too bad, so I blew it out of there pretty quickly.  The bottom line is that I found those 2 silvers in what I’ll call the “upper zone” of the site.  Until then, despite the place being huge and having many zones, I’ve only ever found them in the lower zone, and an embankment.

The upper zone is old, and should have old stuff, it just never has despite my many attempts.  But on Friday, I got my first wheatie up there, and kept at it, and eventually got a rosie.  Got the Q at the very end of the hunt, in the tailings from where it looks like they just stumped and rooted out an old growth tree.  Pretty much luck, and not a great tell, but always check the spots of recently removed old trees.  3 time this has happened for me.

Well, that’s 36 silvers from this place now.  The upper zone is large enough to have a few more, but not sure it will.  Its a really hard site — both trash and mineralization.  And, I’ve never heard anything deep in the upper zone (the lower zone has much less trash, making it easier to hear the deep ones).  While I have faith in the big unit coil for both trash and mineralization, I want to drop down to the pro coil for this section just to see. (Still waiting for my backup lower shaft hardware from that dealer, which I paid for nearly a month ago (like the other small dealer who didn’t even respond, I guess he doesn’t want to sell me a CTX 3030 someday either).  Next time I’ll just use KellyCo.  I like supporting smaller dealers, but I expect reasonable service at least.  Say what you want about KellyCo, they have always served me fine).

Sunday SAR

I did get out Sunday to help an SAR team find some lost personal effects from an apparent suicide from December.  I’ve never done this before, and it was quite interesting.  There were about 15 detectorists from our club on the project, and I missed being the one to find what they were looking for by a foot.  A sometime hunting buddy of mine found the goods, buried just under the ground.  It was in a heavily wooded, off the beaten path of a thorny park, so I didn’t expect to find anything but what they were looking for, but did find a colonial era shoe buckle and some recent buckshot, even tho hunting is illegal here.  Of course, I didn’t mind not finding anything; I like doing my civic duty when I get the chance.  A writeup in a local newspaper of the suicide is here.   (As an aside, I don’t feel right blogging additional details of the event that we were given).

Today’s Hunt

Onto today’s hunt, which was a new site, cause I’m still waiting for my coil hardware, and they are not good about mowing the grass at Friday’s site, which is finally getting long a month late (tho this week is still feeling like the endless winter again).

Today was one of the deadest sites I can remember.  After about an hour, I had a total of 3 coins, and I only left 2 clad coins in the ground.  And this is a site that is still in use.  Are you kidding me?  I got the impression that someone must be working it on a daily basis.  No surface clad.  No midrange clad.  No deep clad.

One thing that I noticed about the site was that it was very lightly mineralized (auto rec at 28, and it let me use channel 9, which is pretty much best case; channel 9 is the best, but it is often bad in crappy dirt).  I decided to hit the edge, and go really really slow: I often make jokes about how slow you have to swing the E-Trac: “If you see the coil moving, you are going too fast”, “There are two speeds, stop and slower than that”.

That’s the way it usually is with me, but I went even slower than normal, and hit a wheatie, measured at 10 inches, not counting the grass.  I rarely get small coins deeper than 5 or 6 inches (and often note it when I do), and also wonder about those who claim to be pulling silver dimes at 11 inches.  Not that I doubt their claims, but do they carry a tape measure like I do?  It can be surprisingly subjective.  OTOH, I never get dirt this clean around here, so I can see how folks are hitting them if they have clean dirt.  That was the deepest small coin I can remember hitting in quite some time, if ever, tho my memory isn’t what it used to be.

So, that was the game, go glacially slow, and dig any deep, iffy signal.  I figured I wasn’t gonna get a dime at that depth, cause dimes are smaller and don’t halo like wheaties, but I figured I had a shot at a quarter.  At least it was nice that someone had cleaned out all the trash and clad, but I was still digging my share of iron falses that sounded like they could be deep silvers or wheaties.  You really had no choice.

Then I got one out of the blue, a deep 02-48, 01-46, that sort of thing, which turned out to be a walker at 9 inches.  Are you kidding me? Sounded great, and I was almost certain it would be a silver quarter.  Was surprised it was a silver half, in this totally dead site.  Unbelievable.  But we’ll take it, obviously.  Always a sweet sight at the bottom of the hole.

I didn’t find much more.  A few more wheaties, all deep, and a rosie, for my 100th silver coin of the year.  Whohoo!  This coin actually wasn’t that deep, but it was a real pain in the ass.  It was at the very edge of the site, in a real gravely area, where the pinpointer went off on everything.  Like there are little pieces of coal and iron in the gravel.  It didn’t even sound like a silver.  The first time I opened the hole, that’s all I was getting, pinpointer hits on everything, and no coin.  I decided F this, and lets move on, but rescanned, and still heard it (sounded like a wheatie), and gave it one more try, a little off where the old plug was, pinpointer was still useless, and I eventually poked it out of a tangle of roots.  I was actually surprised it was a silver.  I wonder how many other silvers I’ve left out there like this, cause I ain’t patient unless I’m at least 80% certain its a silver.

So, despite finding 2 silvers in 3 hours at this new place, I’m not sure I can justify going back.  It just felt so dead everywhere, and as I expanded out from the edge where the stuff was to the middle, I could not muster a single coin.  But. we’ll see.

So, that’s that.  I think most of the words are spelled right.  But the cleaned up walker looks alot shinier in person for some reason.

Here’s today’s finds from the site of recent entries: a pair of silver coins, and one of those sterling “get laid” rings (sorry, I forget what they are actually called).

Wasn’t really into it today, for obvious reasons, but continued to grid out the park from recent entries, and managed to pull a pair of silver coins, and 4 wheaties.  Yesterday I pulled a rosie and a merc (no pic), and 12 wheaties, so it is definitely getting thinner, as expected, as we get farther and farther from the better part of the site.

Maybe I can add something of value here, and that is that I pulled 12 clad quarters, and only 3 clad dimes today.  These ratios are important (at least to me).  While we all cherrypick the quarters, and leave the dimes, I was leaving quarters as well, and don’t recall leaving too many dimes, so I think today’s ratio is true.  This skewed ratio tells me the problem isn’t “hunted out”, but “mineralization”, and that gives you the confidence to keep at it, manage channels diligently, and investigate every iffy signal, and hope you are lucky enough to hear a silver thru the noise rather than giving up.  Thinking about these things help you pull silver from supposedly “hunted out” sites, when perhaps that is not the proper diagnosis.  I hear it all the time “I guess you are not hunting parks anymore”, or words to that effect, and yeah, even I’ll hunt out all my sites over time, but I don’t think that is the best way to look at the problem.  Looking at the problem as an economist would might be the better approach, and might lead to an extra silver now and then.  Who knows?

Hope today’s tip was valuable.  I don’t think it was, but it works for me.  Hard to explain. I guess.

My thoughts to the victims and their families.  If it we’re me, I’d want others to go on with their daily routine as if nothing happened — posting finds, and so forth, whatever it is.  But its not me, its a sad day, and hopefully tomorrow will be a less sad day.

Amazing that you can find a way to get out on weekends when you have a site that can only be hunted on weekends.  Well, I got out to last Saturday’s 5 silver site for a few hours early this morning, and scored a merc.  Not a great run rate (1 per 4 hours), but we’ll take it.

Trying to expand last Sat’s grid, and it was dead, went the other way, and that’s were she was, along with a handful of wheaties.  Beyond that, more dead.  Site has been pounded hard, so I am lucky I got what I got, and was struggling to even get clad.  Site is so huge, so it is hard to figure out how to play it, but it mostly seems dead.  The one nice thing, tho, is that I am getting quite a few deep old field tells, such as colonial era buckles, buttons, and other hardware.  The only coins I’m gonna hear at that depth are coppers or silver half dollars, and 200 year old silver half dollars just don’t happen (at least not to me).

So, back to the park of recent entries, which we figure to Farewell Farewell either today or tomorrow, and I work corner zone here, corner zone there, loose ends and all that jazz, and its sort of the Nothing of the All or Nothing thing — you know you aren’t gonna get anything, but you don’t know how you know (its almost a psychic bond with the earth, machine, universe, whatever, but economists don’t believe in that BS (but we want to know why)).

So, you come back, and decide to expand the main grid in the primary zone, which appeared dead a couple of days ago, with speculation about weak batteries, heat affecting the big unit coil, dry dirt, and so forth.   As much as I’d like to do science on this section, the batteries were fresh, temp was 25 degrees lower, and we had heavy rain last night.  Too bad.  I like science.  In any case, I’ll always charge the batteries every night now (used to be every 2 or 3 nights), but I can’t control the weather.  (As for science regarding the big unit vs the pro coil, its waiting for Godot on the hardware I need to make it hassle-free from these pain in the ass MD dealers who either don’t respond, or promise one thing and don’t deliver.  I guess they don’t want my business).

So, I guess I should get on to the actual finding of the silver, cause what else matters?  As it turns out, as I expanded the grid past the dead zone discussed in previous entries, I started pulling wheaties again, in fact, I pulled 7 of them without finding a single silver coin.  Are you kidding me?  Another ratio hit.

But, as much as I hate wheaties, they are nice tells, and keep the morale going, and eventually I got a 53 rosie.  Woohoo.  This was a hard one, it came in at 01-29, but had a tight pinpoint.  You dig it in open space, especially after a few wheaties, but you will never hear it in the trashy sections of a site (at least I won’t).  That may help explain part of the All or Nothing syndrome in some cases.  I only dug it cause I was desperate for a silver.  It was only 6 inches deep.  Welcome to the world of our variable mineralization.  This is where I have envy for those with that beautiful sandy loam clean non-mineralized soil who are digging dimes at 10 inches.

And on we go, a bouncy 12-46ish deep signal, which I knew was a silver before I dug it, but was surprised it was a 1908-O barber Q.  Sweet.  We’ll take it.  Its only my 9th barber Q, so it is quite a thrill.  A deep, iffy modern merc rounded out the the day.  All silvers were hard, deep (for this place_, and late in the day.  We’ll take em all, cause finding silver coins is hard, and, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do any more science to find out why.

This site is now at 30 silvers, most of them from a couple of years ago.  I don’t see it going above 32 or 33, based on what is left, even if I grid over previous areas with the big unit.  Its huge, but too many areas have  dudded.  I’d love to go over the area from the other day that dudded, with fresh batteries, cooler weather, and wet soil, in the name of science, but it the name of impatience, it ain’t gonna happen.  Too bad.  So, next week, when this site is closed, we’ll be once again scrambling to find a new site, or trying to breathe life into an old one.

Yesterday was back to Monday’s 4 silver park to start closing it out, adding onto the grid, and got 4 wheaties early, then nada for 3 hours.  WTF?  More all or nothing — its usually not like this.  It felt the E-Trac just wouldn’t hit deep.  I had crap auto rec, and was getting crap channels (4 and 7), so there may have been something technical with the dirt, who knows?  Its rare that I go an extended period of time without hitting anything deep.  I wonder why?  Battery was low, but I figured it was all digital, but maybe not?  Maybe the big unit was too hot (they make ’em white to reflect heat, and while I am no engineer, it is possible that the engineer knows that heat may be an issue with this coil.  Thing is, I did very well with this coil last August, so I’m not sure heat is an issue).

Anyway, today was back to the same site to try to do some science, at least see if a fresh battery made a difference, and swap out the big unit for the pro coil if I got an iffy signal.  But, the hardware to make swapping coils easy didn’t arrive (I had the package, but not all the parts were in it), so I decided to hit some loose ends of the site instead with a view to closing it out this week.

One loose end, an embankment with old trees didn’t pan out.  Too bad.  Many times, embankments work out, including at this site, where many of the silvers have come from a different one.

Since the other embankment was so good in the past, I decided to hit 2 ranks of flat area just above it (despite the fact that the flat area in general had no good tells on previous prospecting), and that turned out to be a good idea.  I hit 4 wheaties, including a very deep one (so my confidence in the machine and the big unit was restored, tho this area is far from the other area, and I was able to use channel 2), and then hit a merc at just 3 inches.  Are you kidding me?  This park is hard, and gives up its silver very grudgingly.  It was a 12-45, you often don’t dig ’em when they are shallow, but fortunately it had “that sound”, but I was still shocked.  Not to far on got the ’37 Q, crap signal, and not too deep, but I think it was on its side, cause I got it with the digger, and it ended up in the tailings.  Rounded it out with a rosie that was somewhat masked by a modern penny, but you could still hear it.  Love the E-Trac.

Such a huge park, but so few areas produce.  Fill and grade isn’t an issue, so its sort of a smaller scale all or nothing.  I guess I should just stop trying to figure stuff out.  Still some loose ends to do, I will try to expand the main grid, and will probably go over the main embankment again as carefully as possible, then its Farewell Farewell to another site.  But, at least I don’t think that will be tomorrow.

Back to my favorite silver municipality, which was really good for me in 2011, to try a new site, a very small, but old playground in a very old neighborhood.  Site completely dudded, not even a single wheatie.  Small sites rarely seem to work out for me, unless they are completely out of the box or excessively trashy, but one less than a quarter mile away gave up a barber Q and several other silvers in the past, so it was worth a try.

I gave up after a couple of hours, and hit my backup site, a 20 silver site that gave most of them up in the fall of 2011, with 3 last spring, and 1 a couple of months ago.  Its huge, but very thin, outside of a couple of specific zones I worked some time ago.

I still keep meticulous records of all my grids in case I ever go back (its not an exact science; I have to pace them off from landmarks, and this site doesn’t have many), but I set up to expand my grid, and managed to pull 4 modern silver coins (the oldest a 1926 dime), and 6 wheaties.  All were deep.

I was only here for less than 2 hours, and this has never been a 2 per hour site, at least not since the early days, and prolly not even then.  Both rosies, however, were in the same hole, so it is really 3 events.  But hey, I guess I’ll work it some more this week, and see how it goes.

I will say that this could be about the big unit.  All the silvers found at this site before this year were found with the pro coil, and I always felt this site was meant for a bigger coil, given that most of the old coins in the past seemed right at the edge of the pro coil’s range, and its a very clean, sparse site.  While today’s coins were deep, I was hitting them well.  We’ll see how it goes the rest of the week (I don’t really have any other site in development right now anyway, tho plenty to work on closing out that are not promising).  I may even consider gridding out the hotter sections I did with the pro coil, tho that will take forever, and has had mixed results at previous sites where I’ve tried it.

The good news is that this site is now at 24 silvers.  Once a site gets above 21, it almost always jumps to the high 30s (only one exception), and usually makes it to honeyhole status.  I wonder why?  Its that All or Nothing thing again.  I think I get the killer instinct at this point — I feel it now, tho I never saw this as more than a high teens site in the past.  Amazing what a different coil (or different machine), could possibly due to breathe new life into a site.

The other good news is that I saw 82 on my car thermometer today.  Are you kidding me?  Maybe even warmer the rest of the week.  Finally.  Bring it on.  Now we need rain — ground is parched for the first inch, but damp below that.  Grass is still very short, unlike this time last year.  That’s worth an inch, and can also be a factor at better success at this site.  Given how everything seemed on the edge of detectability here in the past, a note to myself to possibly regrid when the grass is this short (don’t think I’ll be able to do that this year before it grows).

All cleaned up, a couple more 61 dimes for the pile, just like Saturday —

Another rough series of hunts, but it ended on a high note.

Wed 4/3 was back to the “old honeyhole” site I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently to formally close it down.  65 silvers as of 4/27/2011, and 2 more recently for 67 total, but none on Wed.  Farewell Farewell.  Was an awesome site (my 4th best), but all things must pass.  Was gonna put up a GE image of the site and 30s aerials, to show what a sweet site it was, but I want bang this out and watch basketball.  As I’ve written before about this site, its been pounded by the competition since I was last there — I leave the wheaties and clad, and they were gone this time around, tho I did dig a few deep wheaties and a deep clad quarter on its side.

Thu 4/4 was to try to open up a new site, yet another old sports field.  Disappointment when I arrived as I saw half the site had recently been regraded and was freshly planted with grass.  Of the half that was left, half of that was under brutal power lines, and I could not get anywhere do to the EMI.  That left the last 25%, which at least was likely the oldest and most used, but it has been hit hard — no shallow clad.  I did manage 8 deep wheaties, but nothing shiny, and while there are handful of silver dimes here, I had neither the luck nor the patience to find them after 3 hours of misery.  I doubt I’ll be back, but we’ll see.  I’ve never been to the town in question, and there are other interesting sites there.

Onto the backup site, which is old houses, no longer standing, on public property.  These sites can be iffy, cause once the competition figures it out, and it isn’t hard, they can be cleaned out, the hope is that technical skill with the machine will find what they missed.  Other than a few deep high tone trash and deep clad, I didn’t find anything.  Will give the site one more try some other time.

Fri 4/5 was hunting some small 100 year old parks in Philly with a friend from the Facebook group.  This wasn’t gonna end well — really old small parks in high density areas rarely end well (I only know of one exception in my career), and it didn’t, tho I was surprised to find 3 wheaties at the extreme edge of one of them.  In all honesty, we didn’t spend enough time at the latter parks to get a feel, but they didn’t look for feel like silver parks to me.

So, the massive slump continued, and, to this point, I had dug 21 wheaties in a row without digging a silver coin.  That, I believe, is a record for me.  By my ratios, that should have translated into at least 8 silvers, and even by the worse case that others report (7:1, ouch!), I should have gotten at least 3.  But I got bupkis, and have no site, and low morale.

Sat 4/6 I was able to get out to a new site, as the kid was mired in homework, and the wife mired in a mall crawl (ouch!).  This site is an old school on older farmland.  These can be iffy, cause they are easy targets, but you can sometimes get a copper or barber half or such from the old farmland, as well as the mercs and rosies.  And besides, I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

And it started out badly,  No shallow clad.  That’s a bad sign.  No deep clad either.  Even a worse sign.  But, the site is large, and I figured density would be an issue, and I kept at it, and I did get a deep colonial era buckle, which was good, and then I got a deep ’66 clad dime,  which was even better.  I set up a grid around the ’66 dime, and was in business.

Got a deep 11-46 which is almost always a clad Q around here, but I knew it was silver before I dug, and was overjoyed to see a rosie pop out.  My first silver coin in forever.  Not only that, pinpointer went off when I put it back in the hole, as I always do (note to newbies — always do this), and my second silver coin in forever was a merc.  We’ll take it.

They are singing the national anthem for that basketball, so I better wrap this up.  Next decent signal was a deep silvery 01-45, and that always ends well (often as a big silver), and it did, a deep rosie on its side (coins on their side always sound bigger cause I think the E-Trac picks up the signal from both sides and adds it).

Then I got something cool, it was like a 12-37 with a 09-44 mixed in that sounded like silver; I could hear it, but could not isolate it.  I figured the 12-37 was a zincoln in the way of the deep silver, so I went to pull the zincoln first so I could isolate the silver, and instead got a spill, a rosie, 3 memorials, and a wheatie, my first wheatie of the day.  Hot damn!  Rescanned, and heard the zincoln as a 12-32.  Sweet!  Got all the coins without the trash.  But, I dug it out anyway, cause I was there, and maybe it was a gold ring, but it was one of those thick, old-style pull tabs.

Next swing, right past the 5 coin spill + pulltab produced a slam dunk rosie.  5 silver coins in 3 hours.  Whohoo.  But, only 3 events, as two were spills.  But we’ll take it, who wouldn’t?

But, there’s more.  Unfortunately, its much less exciting.  It was only lunchtime, and I’m thinking a double is in the cards today, but I have to go out to get lunch, and as I’m leaving, all these cars are coming in with all these little kids in sports outfits heading for the area I was working.  My day was done, as I didn’t feel like exploring elsewhere on the site, especially when I was doing so well there, and so poorly elsewhere on the site.

So, after lunch, I head for my backup site, which is just a huge field with no reason to believe there will be anything there, but occasionally you can get reales or coppers in these fields (I’ve gotten 3 reales this way, and well over 20 coppers and a barber half this way as well, so you never know), but I didn’t get much.  Just a couple of wheaties, and a real heartbreaker, a deep, sweet silver sound that turned out to be a 1972 clad Q on its side at 7 inches.  Are you kidding me?  In a non-descript field.  Giving me a heart attack.  Once again foiled on the big fish.

So, what I’m not understanding is the All or Nothing way my hunting seems to work.  Forgetting things like non-descript fields, which no one expects to work, I either seem to get monster days or monster sites, or nothing at the next site.  Just don’t understand it.  For someone obsessed with stats and numbers, I’d just love to ride the stats wave, and figure any old site I plop into, I’ll run at 1 per 1-2 hours.  But it just ain’t working out that way.  I wonder why?  Is it mineralization, and the E-Trac being more suited to some sites than others?  Is it the incompetence of the competition, who doesn’t keep meticulous records of all the sites, and finish them off in an efficient manner?  Is it that we are still working off that “golden age”, more silver than time and competition to get it all yet, but that day is coming fast and soon?  Or, do I just overthink everything?  Who knows?

What I do know is that I am running out of sites myself, as previously blogged.   I think there is no chance I will be doing this next year at this time, due to lack of sites, unless I reinvent myself and become a full time door knocker?  While I’m not afraid to do that, I’m not sure I’ll enjoy the experience.  But, we’ll see.  I am addicted to the experience of seeing the shiny in the hole.  But I see a future of always struggling to find a new site.  Today’s site, of course, can only be hunted on weekends and in the summer, so I’ll be trying a new site on Monday.  Hopefully, it will be All, instead of Nothing.  We’ll see.  At least it is in my most productive municipality, and the backup site is a 20 silver site I have yet to finish off.

Ok, I got to watch that basketball (way too much blather tonite, but I’m excited after dropping a 5 spot while in a horrific slump).  Few things trump detecting, but March Madness is one of them.  And, not only won’t we get a morning edit on this one, we won’t even get a clean up edit right now.  So, I hope its readable.

Lets see those slump breaking dimes again all shinied up  —

Endless winter over my foot.  Forty degrees and than incessant chill wind again today.  The leaves are not even sprouting on the trees yet, and that’s usually a mid March thing around here. I would have toughed it out if I still didn’t have a cold, but I called it a day after an hour or so.

So, rather than working or researching, which I should be doing, I wanted to post one of my little stories from my cross country trip from last year (something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but who has the time?).  It wasn’t a detecting trip, but I did do a little detecting along the way.

This is from 6/11/12, in Kokomo Indiana.  I had about 2 hours to detect while there, and found a map online from 1877.  Below is the section I found interesting, due to the “Normal School” (whatever that means).  Old schools always seem a reasonable place to start.

But what’s there now?  Here’s the GE of the block that school was on.

Sweet! A parking lot.  Its either public property, or close enough, I imagine, and there are plenty of grassy areas.  I figured it would be hunted out, but it was worth a shot.

And it was mostly hunted out, but I did score a 1939 merc and a couple of wheaties for my trouble, on the west side.  In two hours, I didn’t cover much more than that.  There just as easily could have been a seated there, given the age of the block.  Maybe there is.

Its really hard to drive into a town you know nothing about, and find a place that might have silver, much less find one (I failed in a previous town in Ohio the day before, tho I did get some deep wheaties there), so that was cool.  Add Indiana to the list of states I’ve found silver in.

So, that’s that.  If you can’t find silver, you can still write about finding it in the past, and in any case, certainly better than yesterday’s train wreck (and yeah, we prolly need to reinstate the morning edit).  There are three or four more installments to this series; hopefully I’ll find the time to do them in the next 10 years.

I did pull a silver today (a ’44 merc), so some would say the title is misleading, but its not like that.  Its a slump.  And, for control freaks, stat freaks, grind it out and force success freaks like me, its like that.

But hey, we’ll take it, silver coins are hard to find, and any hunt that produces one is a good hunt.

Today was back to the “old honeyhole” site of about a week ago, a site that has given up 66 silvers and a site I’d like to formally close, to work some edge sections, including a section that I think an old house was located in.  These rarely end well, cause the competition has been all over it since the the 70s, but it did give up some nice deep high tone tells, but no silvers.  Maybe the competition was leaving that stuff in the ground, who knows?

When my patience waned on the putative old house section, it was back to the hot zone section of the site for some careful low and slow gridding to see what I (and every joe schmoe since me) missed since 2011, and it was a couple of deep wheaties next to iron.  Are you kidding me?  I’m not paid enough to solve these deep, stupid, wheaties, and, at one point, I figured I’d just dug my 16th consecutive wheatie without a silver.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about a ratio killer.  I think my record on this stat is 17, so this is a pretty yucky streak.

Then, something amazing happened.  There was a edge of a silver dime poking out of the side of the hole.  What a sweet sight!  Woohoo.  I’ll never tire of that sight, and as rare as it has been lately, it is even sweeter.  One silver in 3.5 hours.  One more hunt to close this site, which I really haven’t dealt with since the spring of 2011, but I just wanted to see if my improved skill and improved unit would make a difference.  I don’t think it did.

BTW, at least this site had a nice auto rec, 24-26 range.  I’m noticing that this stat tends to run with the geography: Northern Chester County good, Southern/Western Chester County bad (there’s no “Eastern Chester County”, go figure).  The odd thing is that the last honeyhole I closed was in the bad section (and was the only good site I’ve ever had in that section); I think that had to do with the shallow bedrock at that site.  All of this stuff bears watching if one is worried about their efficiency, as of course all economists are.  Too bad all the good good section sites seem to be more or less hunted out — at least I can take consolation in the fact that I was the one who did it, for the most part.

Now what?  Same problem as last entry — the inevitable decline.  Tomorrow will be an abandoned old house site — I don’t like these sorts of sites, cause the competition has been hitting them since the 70s, but we’ll see how it goes.  Maybe it hasn’t been hit with an E-Trac yet.  We’ll see.