First hunt since last entry.  Sort of on a mini-vacation lately, or, what we like to call a vacation to Chester County.

But, back to that pain in the ass site with tons of high tone trash, rocks, and other annoyances, to try to close it out, and I do a large edge, out of the box section, and I get bupkis.  Then I say I’ll do two grid ranks further into the primary zone, , and, unless I get a good tell, I’m done here, and am closing the site.

But, after mountains and mountains of more high tone trash, all of which I dug, I got one that worked, on the second rank, just before closing the site.  It was a very consistent 01-46 to 01-47, and turned out to be a 1943 Q with a nail on top.  You can even see the ferrous stains on poor George’s head.

(You can also see the nail, which I’ve also included (obviously), cause if I didn’t, the title would be cheesier than usual).

The Q was only 3 inches deep, 100 yards from the parking lot (as is pretty much all of this small park), and 3 feet from a path and 10 feet from a tot lot.  Tons of coils have passed over this coin.  Just goes to show that its the machine, not the man, contrary to all the bullshit you might read elsewhere, (tho I suppose a certain mental tenacity to dig all the high tone trash and keep at it at this brutal site has helped).

So, what this means is that I have to persist at this site and close out all of it, rather than go on to more pleasant pastures.  Its now a 5 silver site, at the high end of original prediction of 3-5.  At most, one more, and its a hard, frustrating, unfun site.  Why am I doing it, who knows? — the prospect of silver draws us on forever, even into irrationality.

So, there’s a bit more.  Dug 9 clad quarters, and 1 clad dime today.  Just goes to show how tough the site is, and frustrates me as to the number of silver dimes that are being missed.  Also, why the 01-46, 01-47 print on the Q?  IMHO, and I’m no engineer, its cause metal is metal, and even in see thru mode, and even in ferrous black out mode, the metal of the nail adds.  Always go by tone, but if you are reading numbers, keep this in mind.

Ok, botched this one, but that’s that and I have to move on and make some sangria for Sunday.  That 2 day lead time is certainly the secret sauce, but it is also such a pain in the ass,

Back to the site of the past few days, and pulled yet another piece of silverware.  This one looks like a butter knife with the end gone missing (who brings a butter knife to a picnic?  I guess whoever brings a stick of butter and those fancy rolls).  If I keep at it, I may yet get a sterling place setting from this site.  Unfortunately, no silver coins or other finds worth noting today.

Just in the silverware, that’s over 55 grams of silver from this place.  That’s like finding about 23 silver dimes.  Sheesh.  And the silverware is just as old, if not older.  I’d rather have 23 experiences than 3.  It just don’t work that way, tho, and on top of that, this butter knife is ugly.  Not like a merc (or 23) in the hole, that’s for sure.

Well, I’ll never figure this site out, but, fortunately, I don’t have to, cause its almost done.  Very weird, to say the least.

Those who read me know what an “everything but the girl” hunt is — you do all the right things, pull all the right tells, yet go home silverless.  We’ve all been there,  But, of course, it can be worse.  You do all the right things, pull all the right big fish tells, and go home with a 1962D rosie.  Well, any day with silver is a good day, so who am I to whine?  I got the girl, after all.

But lets roll this and try to make it make sense.  Back to the site of the last couple of entries, expand the grid, and the first target of the day was the ’62D rosie.  Woohoo.  Early silver is special — it means the rest of the hunt is on the house.  It was a hard, ferrous affected silver, but I was fairly sure it was gonna be a silver before I dug it.  We’ll take it.  Nice to reaffirm that dimes are possible at this place.

Next was was yet another deep, big, high tone, a problem that plagues this place, and, coupled with the hard dirt and rocks, makes it possibly the toughest place I’ve ever detected, and, after digging deep for about 15 minutes, out pops a complete sterling silver spoon.  Are you kidding me?  This was 10 feet from the first base line of a baseball field that dates to the 30s.  How did the competition miss it?  Is it cause its deeper than they expect, and then when they get there, if it ain’t coin shaped, they assume it its trash and leave it before identifying it?  Who knows?  Never assume anything.  Follow thru until you’ve identified both the metal and the object, especially if the site is wickedly old.  This is only the second or third complete silver spoon I’ve ever dug, and I’ve never dug one at a normal run of the mill park where you’d expect the competition to have gotten it 20 years ago.

But, there’s more.  More spoonage that is.  First multi-spoon hunt in my career.  Maybe I should track this on the stats page.  The next one came in as a slam dunk silver quarter, and it took me forever to find it, cause there was all this coal like stuff in the hole which kept whacking the PP.  I only got the bowl, but it seems really old.  Tests as silver, but the way the acid worked on it, it looks like coin silver (900 silver), rather than sterling.  That means its prolly in the 200 year old range.  Where’s the handle?  Where’s the 200 year old silver quarter that should have been there?  Where’s the supermodel?  I sort of felt jinxed, working thru this brutal site, to come up with a complete silver spoon, then a 200 year old silver spoon bowl that should have been a silver Q dated 1813.

But, there is actually more.  Yet another miss on the supermodel.  Got a wicked deep iffy high tone, which I was sure was gonna be an affected, old silver Q or half, and turned out to be this old looking key.  Old keys are cool, but this one is kinda lame cause its missing the key part.  Looks like the handle was copper, yet the stem (and presumably the key part), was ferrous.  Who makes a key like this?  Any key experts reading?  The amazing thing about this was that I hit the ferrous part at about 7-8 inches, and it was sticking straight up.  I figured — yet another nail — but I always remove them to see if we can hear the high tone better afterwards, and out comes the copper handle, which must have been at 10-11 inches.  Amazing the E-Trac heard that thru the mineralized ground, thru the ferrous stem, and onto the high tone handle at 10 inches.  Unbelievable.  Would have been more unbelievable if it were a bust quarter.  Where’s the supermodel?  That second spoon bowl and key seem really old.  Oh well.

My wife says the key is really cool.  I agree.  Too bad about the business end being ferrous.

Back to yesterday’s site.  This is the sort of site where you really have to bring your A game.  There’s trash.  There’s big trash.  There’s brutal mineralization.  The ground is hard.  The ground is rocky.  There’s alot of deep high tone trash that sounds to die for, until its some nameless copper widget 10 inches deep, which burns you out digging for it (but you dig anyway, cause it could be a seated half or something, given how old the area is).  The E-Trac sounds like a bad heavy metal band playing out of key on cheap equipment.  Brutal.

I don’t know if I have my A game at this place, but I did find 2 wheaties in the first 15 minutes, and another Q within an hour.  Not bad.  The Q was sort of hard, between some trash and in highly mineralized ground.  A double whammy.  Saw a bit of 9-44 on my screen, but its more the tone that gave it away.  That sweet sound rarely lies, even when the numbers do.

It was 7 inches deep and fairly hard.  I figured I’d never find a dime under these conditions at this place, and would have to be content with quarters.  And I didn’t find a single clad dime in 3.5 hours of hunting (I don’t dig shallow coins), but I did manage to find a merc right at the end of the hunt.

It was also a weird signal, one of these 18-46, 20-46 sorts of things which almost always are bulbous ferrous objects, but you gotta dig all of these, cause there is absolutely know way to know (at least that I’m aware of), to tell the difference between the bulbous ferrous object and a deep silver in iron that the E-Trac sees in “see thru mode” (if you know the answer, please post).  Sure enough, after I pulled the merc and closed the hole, nothing but null.  It was about 5.5 inches deep.

Its frustrating to know that there are more dimes here, but I can’t see them for technical reasons.  I’m tempted to swap out the big unit for the pro coil so see if it cuts down on the mineralization, but I like the way you can just mow thru a site with the big unit.  I’m torn on this one.

God it was nice to get out today, even if only for a couple of hours.  First time I got out since last entry, aside from one short hunt last week where I tried to finish off that site.  The only area of that site left is the area around the tot lot, and it is always crawling with tots.  Sheesh, don’t those tots know that tot lots and the areas around them are for detectorists?  I was gonna blow the area off, but as I got closer to the tot lot, I was hitting wheaties, so I’ll have to come back in cold weather when no one is there.  Could be the ever-present tots have defended the area well, tho in all honesty I don’t expect to find anything, but I like to close off sites.  Being anal once got me a barber half, so I always do it.

Today’s site was a brand new site, a small park I noticed when driving from PT to the last place.  The site sounded awful; the E-Trac clearly did not like being there, but I did manage to pull a Q after about a half hour or so.  2 deep bottlecaps and a deep clad penny were also nice tells before I found it.

The problem with the site is that the ground is hard and rocky, and the mineralization is brutal.  But, getting a Q on your first visit is a good omen.  I also got 2 or 3 wheates, and those beautiful deep bottlecaps, so that’s all good.  I’m betting a 3-5 silver site at this point, we’ll see.  There might be a problem getting dimes due to the mineralization, tho I did get a couple of deep clad ones.

The nice thing about the site that it is adjacent to a very old church, and some very old houses.  The hope is a big fish spillover from those, or even meeting an owner.  We’ll see.

Its interesting that I’ve gotten more Q’s than dimes lately, and ‘ve been thinking about that.  Getting a Q is like getting 2 dimes plus, right?  But I was thinking I’d prefer a 2 dime hunt to a 1 Q hunt.  Not rational, says the economist.  Just goes to show that its about the experience, not the value, and economists tend to lose sight of these intangibles when doing their analysis.   Ok, enough geekspeak, but another question is: which is better: a 5 dime hunt, or a half dollar hunt.  This is tougher, but again I may come down on the side of the 5 dimes.  The rarity of finding half dollars jacks that experience factor up, but 5 silver experiences in a single day are pretty special — in fact, its greater than the sum of each experience.  Not that I ever expect that experience again.  Been a long time, sadly.

In other news, I got yet another e-mail about so and so wanting to sponsor me.  Are these people for real?  I wonder if they actually read the site.  Who knows?  But, I can’t figure out what’s in it for them (economists always look for the incentive motive of everyone; that’s why we are such a cynical lot (or, maybe born cynics just become economists)).  My guess is that it is along the lines of give me your bank routing # to deposit the funds.  I’m tempted to do it, just to find out.  Curiosity certainly killed the cat, but cats also have nine lives, so we’ll see.  (BTW, and I just noticed this, “curiosity” is a curious word.  The morphology of the “ity” ending, which is common enough to morph an adjective to a noun, nails that “u”.  I never knew that until the spell checker got in my face.  Its rare for morphology to nail an inner letter.  Cool.  I love playing with words (“tendon” and “tendinitis” is my favorite example of this; and people who say English spelling is easy and not arbitrary are morons).

Speaking of wordplay, I haven’t done much metal detecting lately cause I’ve been working 24×7 the past few days on this letterboxing clue.  I don’t think people realise how long these things take to put together.  Just the artwork for that grid is intense labor, not to mention the website coding (I still do this by hand using a text editor using pretty much all deprecated html codes, and I guess it shows.  I remember when I did the blog like that.  Yikes.  I guess I need to break down and get a CMS, but who as the time?).  And none of that stuff even counts the actual content, and putting those puzzles together is hard (but that’s fun, I might do some more of them, cause wordplay is fun).  And I didn’t even do the stamp carving for this project.  Prolly my last letterboxing clue.  The dude I did it for didn’t even bother to thank me (tho I suppose he may someday, I guess), but some different dude did drop $10 in my PayPal today.  Thanks!  Not sure if it was for the blog or the boxes, but cool nonetheless.

Yikes.  Way too much about non-metal detecting topics.  That’s just to scare the prospective sponsors away and baffle the search engines.  But, maybe if I actually start metal detecting again, we’ll be on topic going forward.  We’ll see.

Now, that’s a title that works, I’d say.

Anyway, back to the site from a couple of days ago (and, the only site I’ve worked for the last over a month), where I pulled a largie and a silver ring on that day, to clean up some loose ends, and, hopefully close the site, and I managed to pull two more silver coins.  Not bad.  And for all I write about hunting the “out of the box sections”, these coins were more or less in the “in the box section”.  Go figure.  Of course, I always leave these sections for last, cause they are always hunted out; so sometimes better to be lucky than good.  We’ll take ’em tho, cause silver coins are hard to find.

Its been an interesting site, but, outside of about an hour of terrain I didn’t get to today, its closed.  50’s era park, giving up 11 silvers (4 of them quarters), and 2 large coppers.  The first one was an SLQ found in November, 2010, then I didn’t get back there ’til the end of 2012/beginning of this year, cause it was so dead on that SLQ hunt, but over those few hunts at the beginning of this year, I managed to squeeze out 5 silvers, then tabled the site.

Went back again this summer cause errands and life put me in that area (doctor’s appt, needed a low target site, and it turns out its also near my PT place), and I got 5 more.  Cool.  (I have no idea why I am writing all this crap; I guess its just this feeling that these silvers found me, cause I never expected any silvers at this place, cause its so dead — I guess the point is — keep at it).

Anyway, onto the sangria.  People have asked me for my sangria recipe, so I put it online.  Its good stuff (if you like making and drinking sangria).

Got out for the first time since the last entry; between parties, puzzles, and physical therapy, all things I’m really bad at (tho McBrae’s sangria went over pretty well yesterday; when guest are eating the sangria fruit, you know you nailed it, time to put the recipe online), it was nice to get out and do something I am good at.  And, yes, metal detecting is something you can actually be good at, which is a bit surprising, when you think about it.

Back to the park from the last 2 entries, trying to close it out, into the out of the box section, and it was the ultimate everything but the girl hunt, all the good tells, and even scored an 1810 largie and a silver ring.  But no silver coins.  The largie is in decent shape as these things go around here — full liberty and full date, tho of course a bit abused.

The coin was only 3 inches deep, and just 4 feet from the property line of a 50s era house.  I think my knowledge of the park boundaries, and the private property boundaries have allowed me to squeeze a couple more keepers out of this site.  The recent silver Q’s were in the same paradigm, and it is not a totally obvious paradigm, as the density compared to the rest of the site proves.

Only my 5th copper of the year, so it has been a down year in that dept (not to mention the silver dept, of course), but, I really haven’t detected as much this year.  Maybe as I get past commitments, crises, and my injuries, I’ll be able to do more going forward.  We’ll see.

Oh my, what a past 24 hours.  Lets try to drop something that doesn’t require a morning edit.  Not that hard, here goes —

Back to the site from yesterday, and the hunt before, and pulled another silver Q not too far from yesterday’s, as well as 4 wheaties and a clad dime.  6 coins in 2 hours before a PT appointment to fix my broken body.   We’ll take it.  Gee, that wasn’t so hard, was it?  Surprised that this turned out to be a 9 silver site; and when its closed, I hope I have the time and memory to blog why I think this site is interesting.  We’ll see.

Yeah, I don’t know the date of this one either, but who cares, it works for me.  Its silver.

And yeah, I’m doing the morning edit now.  No one needs to read it.  On an unrelated note, Lagwagon’s Never Stops may have finally climbed my personal charts to be the best song ever recorded.  And, that’s hard, breaking thru that box of Maiden at the top.  These changes are not made lightly, and, in fact, are rarely made at all.  Download the sound.

Got out today was the first hunt since 7/12.  Back to the park of the last entry, which was a 7 silver park, and gave up that large, old, spoon. In the out of the box section.  Interesting that, after the long layoff, the machine sounded a bit weird, and I did not find a single coin in the first hour of detecting, but it is a low density site, and I did find some nice deep high tone junk, which is always nice.    Shifted to a different paradigm in the out of the box section (sort of out of the box in the out of the box, if all those words work), and found 5 deep 60’s memorials.

While 5 cents is nothing to blog about, that is such a killer tell, and I was reward with the goodies, a deep silver Q.  Since the last entry was an everything but the girl hunt, we’ll take it; the science indicated it should be there, and there it was.

Oh, and I don’t even know the date.  40s something is all I know.  Silver is all I know.  What else do you need to know?.