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.

Thursday’s hunt was trying to open up a new site just a quarter of a mile from the recent honeyhole — you figure if one site gives up 65 silvers, the one down the street might give up a few as well.  But it wasn’t to be — all I found is midrange depth clad quarters from the 60s to 80s.  Usually a good tell, but it worried me that I found no dimes or pennies.  The mineralization was brutal, and I guess I’m not seeing them, so I’m not gonna see a silver dime.  Maybe a silver quarter, but I didn’t have the patience.  I only remember this happening once before, in the red clay soil of North Carolina, where you struggle to see clad quarters, and have no chance of seeing smaller coins.  Not sure it is the case here or not, but the site is probably a failure.

Moved on to a big park in the area that I wrote about the other day where I pulled a merc, and I was hoping to open up the site with more silver, but it wasn’t to be.  The park really is pretty hunted out, but I was in a zone that had given up the merc, and it was giving up tons of clad, which is usually a good tell, but all I got was one wheatie and this sterling elephant ring.  Its such a big park tho, there is still a chance of pulling something in an out of the box zone, but again. mineralization is an issue here.

Saturday I met up with some guys at at a massively huge park for some woods hunting — last time I was here, I pulled 3 silver coins, but it was all due to sticking to an old roadbed in the woods, and I worked that paradigm pretty hard last time, so I wasn’t sure where the silver would come from this time, just randomly swinging in the woods, but guys have pulled seated halves, dimes, reales, and so forth from these woods, so you have to give it a go, and besides, its more fun to hunt with others, even if you don’t find anything.  I didn’t find anything, other than a couple of corroded wheaties.  Not sure anyone else did; if they did, I don’t know about it.

I had to attend to some errands, then had some time for another hunt closer to home, at yet another site on my prospective list that I have never been to, and I was again skunked.  This is an old school, and these can be hit or miss, but this was bad, not a single deep coin in the “obvious section”.

But the out of the box section, the corner of the property gave up some wheaties, and I was optimistic, but was not to be.  The wheaties were shallow, and I pulled 6 of em, which means I’m owed two silvers, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out.  The mineralization was the most brutal I remember ever seeing — I was getting an auto rec of 9 for a good part of the hunt, and almost always lower than 15.  I like to be above 21, and consider below 19 pathological.  This site is mostly a writeoff as well, except for one huge old farm field that I may wonder sometime when I’m in the mood to go for a one in a million field score.

So, two prospective sites, both dudding, as well as that park I was hoping to develop, but now looks bleak as well.  You get times like this you feel you will never see silver again — one of the downsides of working a site dry and then moving onto the next one.  One day, there will not be a next one.  Maybe that day is today, who knows?  These sorts of sites do not grow on trees, and meanwhile the competition has been at work on others with their Minelabs as well.   But, I feel like I had a good run since May 2010 if I never find another good site, but I’ll keep trying for a while, or maybe I’ll get more serious about door knocking — but that’s not my style — when I’ve done it, its generally just for the day, and I enjoy the experience of solving a site day after day.

What I’m not understanding is this all or nothing vibe I run into.  Some sites give up 20 to140 silvers, and some give up bupkis.  All basically look the same in the research.  I wonder why.  I wonder if it is about the intense and variable mineralization we seem to have around here, or if it is just the case that myself and the competition are in the process of cleaning everything up, sort of the tail end of a golden age.  Who knows?

Well, at least I won’t have to write blog entries that often, and I can learn to play the lute.

Always the saddest title, even sadder than “Skunked”.

Back to this winter’s honeyhole for the Final Farewell Farewell hunt — cleaning up loose ends, wandering aimlessly around a huge field, and getting skunked (except for a nice field tell – a colonial buckle, not very deep, but there’s no reason to believe the random areas of this field are any better than the random areas of any other random field, and reasons to believe they are worse).

No more old timer’s half dollars.  No big fish.  But the site did produce 65 silver coins, including 3 silver half dollars, one of which may have been one of the old timer’s.  We’ll never know, but it made good copy at the time, and was fun to think about.  The oldest silver coin was a 1901 barber dime.  There may have been some IHs or some abused coppers as well; if so, I don’t remember them.  In any case, my 5th best site ever in terms of silver coin count, tho it did not produce a top 30 career find.  The big fish, if they were there and deep, were hidden by the brutal mineralization.

This was a bizarre site to figure out, and in fact, I never did.  It had the most dense hot zone I’ve ever hit, flanked not 30 feet away by zones that would not even give up clad.  Fortunately, it had one traditional zone that could be meticulously gridded out to get some stray silvers after the hot zone, but that was the exception, not the rule — everything was dead in other directions.  38 in the hot zone (about a half acre).  1 in the devil strip. 26 traditionally gridded out in about a 3-5 acre area.  And acres and acres of dead all around and in between.  Weird.  No doubt alot of fill and grade, incompetent competition, intense variable mineralization, and variable bedrock, and many more factors going on.  Who knows?

So, that’s that.  Onto look for a new site.  We’ll see how that goes.  At least the weather is improving.  The endless winter may finally be winding down.

I love that term, and I guess unless you are from Akron, Ohio, or are a linguistics freak, you may not know what it means.  What it means is that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road.  Turns out its a very regionalized term, and I have no idea what the Chester County term is, so I’ll just use it, cause its cool, and proves I’m well-read on these matters, I guess (I grew up, and now live, in an area without sidewalks, so I don’t have a term, in actuality, but no doubt I’ve used “curb strip” in the past).  (Also turns out someone did a study on these regionalized terms, and published a huge dictionary on the matter.  Very cool, (but still proves many people have too much time on their hands).  Google around for it.  My favorite term has to be “zep”, a term, as far as I know, that is only current in the Schuylkill valley area of Montgomery and Chester Counties (where I did grow up and still live), which means “hoagie”, “hero”, “sub”, and the like (cool to define a regional term with other regional terms; most folks use “hoagie” around here except the true old time locals).  I love it that you can still walk into pizza joints around here (at least the old, cool ones), and see the term on the menu, even in this day and age of homogenization.

Anyway, onto the silver, and you know if the preamble is long, and off-topic, the hunt was likely lame.  It wasn’t too bad, cause any hunt with silver is a good hunt.  Back to the recent honeyhole (not the “old honeyhole”, the one before that where I’ve spent most of my time this year), to work a few undetected sections, including the devil strip along the road that runs thru it, and the first target was a ’41 merc.  Not bad.  Unfortunately, the next three hours produced bupkis (not even a wheatie), except of a gold-filled wedding band.

Hunting devil strips is an acquired taste.  Its hard.  Its trashy, and passersby (I love that word as well; a rare English word that is infix inflected (anyone still working on gender inflected interjections? :))) are in your face from both sides.  And, not only is it trashy, its brutally trashy.  Did I mention that it is also trashy?  But often you can get silver there when the adjacent area is dead, because some people miss them, and some people hate trashy.  I remember one hunted out park that produced nothing but a rosie after hours and hours of hunting, and then in the short devil strip was a walker and a huge silver ring, so its always worth checking out if you can stomach the passersby and the trash.

As for the “gold filled” ring, it claims to be 1/20th of 10K, which I guess makes it .5K.  If that ring were gold, it would be worth about $200, so I suppose its worth about $10.  But, its someone’s wedding ring.  It has names inscribed in it.  Too bad they are common names, and there is no date.  Last time I found one with names inscribed, one of the names was uncommon, and there was an exact date, and I still could not find the owner, despite all the research tools at my fingertips and at the historical society.  The odds of me finding the owner are low, but we’ll see.

So, I think that will be the last silver from this place, as all other areas tested dead, but I will give it one final farewell farewell hunt.  After 65 silvers, I owe it that much.

But, there’s more.  Actually, there isn’t really.  I should really write about the awesome Bad Religion concert Sunday night.  It was the best concert I’ve ever been to (even better than when I saw them 6 or 7 years ago), but I don’t really have the skill, much less the time, to do so.  One thing that was kinda weird tho was that some dude comes up to me and asks how old I am (and I am kinda old to be in a mosh pit and deal with crowd surfing, but I am in good shape and have been dealing with such for 30 years), and I tell him, and he says is friend is 33 and didn’t come cause he thought he was too old to go.  Are you kidding me?  The band has been making music that long.  Get out and live.  Never let your fear decide your fate (ok, I stole that line, but I like it).  Awesome concert in any case.

Well, we got some linguistics instead of the dismal science for a change.  I guess I’m just an intellectual jack of all trades.  Maybe next time we’ll throw in some particle physics.  What is a Higgs boson anyway, and why to we care that its existence was recently (supposedly) confirmed?  Isn’t all that stuff sort of obvious?  Sort of like the collective yawn that occurred when the background microwave radiation was confirmed.  Duh.  (As an aside, I’m proud to have called that one when I was very young, we’ll before it was confirmed and while there were many theories out there that were inconsistent with its existence.  Not that it ever did anything for me — look how I ended up, a slob writing a pseudo intellectual metal detecting blog that gets really excited about finding 60 year old shiny disks.  But, there is always more to the story than meets the eye).

Oh my, that was a bizarre entry.  Should have spent more ink on the BR concert.  But what is done is done; we don’t do morning edits anymore.

Haven’t been out since Wed, and was itching to get out, and despite another cold, dreary day here in late March, got in a rare weekend day hunt.

Went to an old honeyhole — the last time I was here there was 4/24/11, and it turns out its my 4th best site, having given up 65 silvers.  I’ve been thinking about it alot lately, given that my current site, which I will probably close this week, weather permitting (and that is supposed to be even worse next week), is at 64.

I wondered, since I’ve improved so much in two years, whether I could coax a few more out of this site.  This site had one hot zone that gave up 19 silvers in a single day (and it would have been 20 or 21 if my battery didn’t die), and I was wondering if the big unit would help.  And besides, its pretty close to where I live.

But the site was pretty dead.  Alot has happened in 2 years, including, I reckon, the competition buying Minelab machines.  I think I went over it pretty well that spring I was there, but not this well.  Pulled a total of 6 coins in 3 hours.  Are you kidding me?  Just one clad coin, 4 deep greenie meanie wheaties, and a 1946 rosie.  Woohoo.  Any hunt with silver is good.

I passed on three other wheaties, and only one clad dime, so this site has been slammed in the meantime.  It still needs a hunt or two to formally close it off, as there is still silver there, but it is very sparse.

Well, off to see Bad Religion now at the Factory.  One of my favorite bands.  Hard to believe they are still kicking after over 30 years.  Wonder how I’ll hold up in the pit?

Back to the honeyhole to work on one of the two remaining small zones, the first of which gave up a wheatie spill last week, but I had no other intel on it.  A couple of wheats in there today, but no other good tells, and it didn’t have the best sound.  It was cold, and the wind was biting (this is an exposed site, and its always biting, but biting less when the silver is flying).

As much as I would have loved to remain to clean up this section, I decided to cut my losses and head for a nearby site which is more protected from the wind.  Before doing so, I pulled a pocket watch, too bad its base metal.

The second site was where I found just my 12th career silver, way back in the fall of 2009, and I have not been back since.  Its a 50s park in a very old town, so its a mixed bag of expectations.  I’m not sure if my expectations were dashed or not, but it was quiet as a church mouse — not even a wheatie, and I did all the right things, like working the edges, out of the box sections, and so forth.  Obviously not the right things today.

Decided to go home, but that takes me past another old site, a site I’ve hit many times, but have only a rosie to show for it, which I found in 2010.  Everyone claims its hunted out, but its too big to be hunted out.  Its true its hard to find silver here, at least for me, but I’ve always felt the problem was that the mineralization was too extreme, not that there isn’t silver there.  I’ve never had good luck here either, but this was my first hunt at the site with the big unit, and I pulled a merc and a wheatie in the 45 minutes I had.

If I can make this site sing with the big unit, that would be awesome, cause it looks like a 50-100 site, but I’m not too optimistic on that score.  This is my 5th or 6th hunt there, with just two dimes.

Lots goin’ on here tonite.  I feel one of those “story” posts coming, but I think it’ll be all good.  We’ll see.  Lets roll it.

Back to the honeyhole of recent entries was the plan — to regrid from a different angle the extreme 2 per hour hot zone, as we started to last hunt.  Weather was rainy, and as I pulled out of my driveway, it started to pour.  Almost turned around, but its a half hour drive, so maybe it would clear.  It did, just as I got there.  Day was actually nice for a change.

So, first, check this out, heart pounding tone coming in as a beautiful 09-48 at 8 inches.

Lucky Mo-Jo.  GOOD LUCK.  Are you kidding me!  “GOOD LUCK” would have been a SLQ.  “Lucky Mo-Jo” would have been another old timer’s silver half.  Its not even a copper.  Its an effen token with a hole in it.   Silver halfs come in at 3-5 inches at this place, and I dig 8 inches for some Lucky Mo-Jo.

But its cool in its own right.  Check this out.  It never ceases to amaze me what people put on the Internet, and what you can find out there, with just a few clicks of a mouse.  Some dude actually has a blog with scans of a vintage catalog with all sorts of snake oil and whatnot for sale, and this thing is in there —

The full blog post is here, but its very pic heavy.  Its basically a scan of the whole catalog.  Is that catalog cool, or what? As near as I can tell, this thing is from the ’30s or ’40s, which would be consistent with the other coins I’ve dug here.  Hopefully, it will bring me some Lucky Mo-Jo, but I wonder if it brought its original owner such, and how the lodestone and John the Conqueror root worked out for him.

But hey, its cool to kinda think about the person who carried and lost this, in the context of the place, what their life was like, getting such a catalog in the mail and spending a buck’s worth of silver for this stuff, (which could have been lost instead for me to find), and so forth, but lets move on (oh, and as an aside, I had no idea “mojo” was current in the 30s.  I thought it was a more modern borrow.  One more thing to research).

Anyway, onto the silver, and hoping I would have some lucky mojo on that front, going over an area I had already done.  This is the first time I have ever done this to a serious degree, and I was curious how it would go.  On the one hand, you want to find lots of silver, cause you always want to find lots of silver, but that would prove you sucked the first time.  OTOH, you don’t want to find any, cause that would prove you have some skill at working a site, but not finding silver sucks.

My goal was to simply go slow and carefully from a different angle to see what I had missed.  It was sort of an experiment; given that it was such a hot zone, and I had previously found 2 silvers in this section after I had already supposedly finished it. It seemed worthwhile.

And I ended up finding 3 silver dimes and 10 wheaties (the oldest being a 1919), as well as 2 deep clad quarters and the mojo token.

Not bad, or not good, depending on how you look at it.  The first silver was sort of straightforward, could be clad, could be silver, could be a wheatie, but I was pretty sure it was a silver before I dug it.  Other than the somewhat ambiguous TID, there was nothing hard about this one, and I should have gotten it the first time.

The second one was one of the toughest silvers I’ve found in a while.  In all honesty, it may have been a benefit of experiment bias.  It was a deep, iffy, iron false sort of signal, often the sort of thing I don’t dig, as it didn’t pinpoint great, but the second time around, when targets are thin, you may be more likely to dig it.  This was a dime at approximately 7 inches, I’m guessing. with a large piece of iron.  I may not have even heard the dime, just the iron, and got lucky.  As it worked out, I’m diggin’ diggin’ down for this thing, and it seems way deeper than it should be, and I check the tailings on the dropcloth, and there it is.  The thing I was actually going for was the iron hunk, after I had already pulled the silver out unknowingly.  Note to newbies — be aware of this possibility.  It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes what you think is the primary target, may not be, and the good target could always be in the tailings or the plug.  Its part of my protocol to always check this when I think the target is too deep.   In any case, I don’t feel bad about missing this one the first time.  We just had alot of rain, and many other factors could have been different as well.

The third one was a unique experience, and also may be a bit biased.  I hit a shallow canslaw, a big one, and those things sound awful and obvious on the E-Trac, and are easy to ignore, so no doubt I heard it the first time thru.  But this time I thought I heard the sweet sound of silver in the racket.  Was certain there was a silver quarter in there as well.  Couldn’t separate it, but I felt I heard it.  Pulled the canslaw, rescanned, and there it was, a barely legal 64 rosie.  Amazing.  It wasn’t directly under it, but it was close, a little off to the side.  Don’t think I’ve ever found one affected by a huge canslaw before.

As for the wheaties, I expected some, as I generally don’t dig ’em unless they are iffy, but most of these were iffy.  So I missed 10 wheaties, 3 silvers, 3 others the first time, at least that I know of.  In addition to the rain, I do know that when I first started at this site, and I believe the first day and second day in this zone, I was using the pro coil and not the ultimate 13.  So, as an experiment, in terms of controlling variables and whatnot, this doesn’t come close to qualifying, but interesting nonetheless.

Total hunt time today was 5 hours, so it was still not a bad run rate.  Original silvers in this zone was 33, plus 3 more today, and 2 on other days when I thought I was done, for a total of 38.  According to Google Earth, the area is about 100×200 or about half an acre (the site is at least 50 acres, and goes much faster, and much as been written off, and accounts for 26 silvers).  Of course, it was alot faster working it the second time, less targets, and you knew the bounds of the hot zone.  Imagine the run rate you could get if you knew up front exactly where the boundaries are.

So, as an optimization/economic problem, I’m prolly very unlikely to rework a zone of a site I’ve been over carefully, unless it is really dense, and really hard (where there may be benefits from seeing it from a different angle), as this one was.  But, it worked out for me in this case — I’m glad I did it, and glad I took these notes for future reference.

Anyway, enough data, lets see them dimes all shiny’ed up, so I can test this auto gallery update thing.  My hope was to find just one silver coin today, so I can test that live for the first time.  Here goes — we’ll see this pic and Lucky Mo-Jo in the gallery if all goes well.  If not, I’ll be hacking code all night rather than watching basketball.

Took advantage of the down time from the bad weather and being sick (the former which seems to be ongoing indefinitely; the latter mostly passed) to finally do a programming project that was on my list, my gallery of finds from 2012 on.  (Its also under the Galleries menu above).

The idea is that when I make a post, the pics automatically get loaded into the gallery (so long as they silvers, more or less).  Hopefully it works, and hopefully I’ll be finding some more silver to test it on an ongoing basis, we’ll see.

It was a pain in the ass, and took way longer than I expected it to (3 days).  But what’s done is done.  Prolly infinitely many bugs, including not working on browsers other than mine (and certainly not on mobile devices, cause I don’t even have a mobile device, and who’s gonna dial up my finds on their iPhone anyway?), but letterboxers who view my site are used to that 🙂

All the pics are on one page.  But, I like the impact of seeing all the silver at once.  Its my site, after all, so bring a hispeed connection.  TODO tho may be to break it into years, especially if I import my pre 2012 gallery that is still on FMDF.  TODO is to also put my best finds in a Gallery format.  That could look cool.

So, one thing that was kinda sad — I had to read thru alot of my old entries as part of this project, and aside from the fact that I didn’t take a pic of every silver I found (too bad, cause each is hard fought, and it would make the gallery even bigger), was that this time last year I was writing about how the grass was growing too thick to detect at the site I was working. No such luck this year, as the weather remains cold and miserable, with no prospect of improvement in the foreseeable future.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get out this week anyway, assuming the current snow doesn’t amount to anything, we’ll see.

In any case, feel free, if you see an obvious bug in the gallery using a browser I’m likely to have, to drop me a note.

What a miserable week.  I got sick with some sort of fever, cough, sore throat kinda thing.  Went out anyway on Wednesday to my honeyhole, in the gray, cold, chill wind, and was skunked again.  Cleaning up loose ends at the site, and trying to expand a couple more directions from the hot zone that was giving up 2 per hour back a month ago or whenever it was.  Hard to believe, just 30 feet away, I couldn’t even get good tells.  The direction into the field seems played, and while I was getting good tells in some of the loose end sections, no silver.  It was a miserable day.

I couldn’t bring myself to get out Thursday, as the wind was even worse, and I was even sicker, but I did get out today, even tho I am still sick, and got more of the same.  Bupkis.  The site seems played.  Too bad, cause finding new sites can be a struggle.

But I did something I haven’t done much before, and that was to start regridding the hottest zone after I had already covered it fairly thoroughly (at least in my mind).  And I got one.  Gotta do a pic with the dirt on cause even I don’t believe I dug it.  First silver coin since last week.  It was deep and iffy.

What I did on the regrid was grid diagonally.  Most people grid parallel/perpendicular to the edge of the site, but going diagonally may be a good idea, especially if you know it has already been gridded out at traditional right angles.  I didn’t do much of it, so I may regrid the entire hot zone on diagonals very carefully next week.

In addition, there are two other sections I have not spent much time in, and one gave up a wheatie spill during a quick prospecting run.  That said, I don’t think these sections are very promising (which is why I’ve left them to last).  I’ve closed off all of the other paradigms, so this honeyhole is just about played.  Looks like a 61-65 silver site.  Its just the strangest site, with a really hot patch, a traditional density patch just one direction from it, and then huge absolute dead zones right next to it where it should be promising.  Some may have been filled, but old trees and roots in others suggest that that is not the whole story.  Who knows?

One silver this week, I was sick, it was cold, and the honeyhole played out a bit sooner than I had hoped.  What a joy. Hopefully next week will be better.

So, lets see that beautiful rosie all shiny’ed up.  They are exciting, especially if you only get one once a week.

Back to my honeyhole today, no coil issues, no cops telling me about my competition sneaking onto private historical properties (which, if you think about it, is actually a good thing, cause they ain’t at my prospective sites), plenty of iron falses, no bad stream of consciousness writing (at least we hope not), and worst of all, no silver.  I had to endure the silverless drive of shame home, as they call it over on American Detectorist.

Did pull a 1901 IH and 6 wheaties, the oldest being a 1910.  I know some people feel pulling an IH isn’t being skunked, but we all know how I feel about them.  This one is actually one of the better ones I’ve pulled, tho.

So now I have a huge site that appears to have stopped producing — just 1 silver in the past 8 hours, and we really like to be at 1 per 2 hours at worst to continue with a site  — but this site has been so good to me, so I think we have to consider giving it a few more tries.  The direction I’m going in seems pretty played out (tho I didn’t even make it to the road bed yet), but there are plenty of other sections.

Its now back to either prospecting mode here, or trying to find another site.  I guess we’ll see how it plays out.

This is gonna end up being lots of words for a hunt that did not produce one goddamn coin.  But that’s cool, isn’t it; isn’t that what blogging’s all about?  Its not about the shiny or otherwise material success in your endeavours, its about the drama.  Not so in my world, and I rarely blog without the shiny, (and I very rarely hunt on weekends either), but I think this post actually has a chance of working, so we’ll see.

So, alot goin on here.  First, I didn’t expect to find a single coin.  This is what we call a throwaway hunt — I had a couple of free hours late this afternoon with the family doing other stuff, and the thermometer with a 6 handle — are you kidding me?  which hasn’t happened since the month started with an O, so you gotta get outside, even if it is to do yardwork (and my neighbor, who I nickname “Flanders”, actually was, except he was paying someone else to do it, so I guess I’ll call him El Flanders (nevermind)).  In my case, I blow off the yardwork til it actually needs to be done (which is when the grass is actually growing, and the weeds are actually sprouting), and hit a local field about a half a mile from my house.

Like I said, I didn’t expect to find anything.  This is a field that recently became township property (and the corruption involved in that process is fodder for another blogger on another blog), but, as a tip to newbies, paying attention to what goes on in the township w.r.t to land can be valuable.  Too bad it wasn’t today.  But, it is this huge field.  Recently became township property.  Not signed as such.  You never know what you’ll find in an old, nondescipt field that may have been lightly detected.

In this case, not much.  The first looks find ike an old copper, and I found it in the first 3 minutes, but it rings in at a CO 27.  That’s button territory, but it has no shank.  Its not a button.  I have no clue what it is.  The second treasure rang in as a wheatie, so it is obviously copper, but there is no way to score it as a copper.  It is random copper trash.  So that’t that for this hunt in this random, nondescript field.  It could have ended better, but there was no reason to expect it to.

But, there’s more.  And its all interesting, IMHO.  In fact, this entry would not even exist were it not for the following.

First, its the cop.  As a bit more background, I just pull into this field and park, cause there ain’t no beautifully lined-striped macadam parking with those blue handicapped spots where obese, but otherwise able-bodied folks park their Lexus’s and Benz’es with their handicapped placards (and yeah, as an economist with a severely handicapped mother, I specifically observe this phenomena, and an contemplating a paper on the subject), and after about an hour I see this cop pulled up next to my car.  Of course I stop what I’m doing an go over, and he asks if I have permission to be here, and I say I have permission to detect any township property (which is actually true, and he’s impressed that I actually know its township property), and he chats me up, telling me he’s thinking about getting a machine, and asking me for recommendations, and so forth, and that all goes well.  And I tell him, don’t detect here, cause there ain’t nothing, but I do give him the location of a 41 silver site honeyhole on township property.  The advantages of office.  Ok, too much background for the punchline.

And the punchline is simple, and is this.  He’s telling me that he sees people constantly detecting a private property site near the police station.  Its a rather famous site in the area (even I know about it, and I’m clueless), and I’ve even asked permission there.  They said NO with a capital N, and told me stories of all the detectorists they chase off the property.  I guess some things never change, and while I’m saddened by the lack of ethics by my competition, I take solace in two probabilities — a) its likely hunted out by the parade of assholes who didn’t get caught, so the modern assholes are in a bad risk/reward proposition, and b) once again the predictions of the Dismal Science are affirmed.  Its nice to know that you are in a line of work that will never fail, so long as humans (and hence human nature), exists.

But there’s even more, and that’s story #2 from today’s hunt.  Its about the Big Unit (the Detech Ultimate 13), and software.

I’m hunting this dead field, pulling the random thing that looks like a copper but isn’t every half hour, but otherwise having nothing but pure boring threshold (which is actually rather soothing when composing cop-related blogs in your head) to listen to, and all the sudden things get all wacky.  All sorts of low tone sounds both when the coil is on the ground and when in the air.  The exact same symptoms when my first Big Unit went bad.  Are you kidding me?  All I need is another bad coil.  I noise cancel every three seconds, and it ain’t fixed.

Then I turn the machine off, and on, and it is fixed.  Are you kidding me?  I remember an entry from quite some time ago where I write about improved success after lunch (where I always turn off the machine), and I said I wasn’t gonna attribute anything to turning off the machine (if I was a real blogger who cared, I’d link to the entry, but I ain’t and I don’t (more likely, it was one of my “stories” on American Detectorist; it was a long time ago)), but now there is no question in my mind that it matters.  I’m an ex software guy (and good riddance to that life).

Software guys have a fancy technical term called “waxy buildup”.  In layman’s terms, what this means, is that the longer a software program runs, even if it is essentially doing the same thing (“running the main loop” in software guy jargon, which no doubt the E-Trac is doing), its performance may degrade (there are technical terms to throw about here as to why, but nevermind); as time goes by.

The solution to waxy buildup, other than find another software guy, is to reboot the program or system.  The fact that rebooting the E-Trac fixed this problem is suggestive of a waxy buildup problem in the E-Trac software.  This is the second observed instance of improved performance after turning off and on, and sadly, this will now have to become part of my hunting protocol.

(As an aside, when the Big Unit coil did go bad a few months ago, I did lots of turn off, turn off tests, and waxy buildup was not the problem.  The coil was genuinely bad, as apparently verified by KellyCo.  Hopefully that is not the case this time, and it is a software issue).

But, there’s even more, if you can believe it!  As I said, Lots of Words.  One further wonders how I could write so much when I found not one f***ing coin.  The answer is simple — I like to write.  You obviously like to read, but as Umberto Eco (my literary hero) says, “who needs readers?”.

But here is story #3, and its about iron falses.  I’ve always wondered about iron falses.  I’m detecting this park, and that park, and got the sens cranked at 30, as always, and of course you get your share of iron falses, and the deep iffy ones you dig, cause you have to, cause once in a while its a deep barber or seated, but more often than not, its a rusty nail, and we all know how VLF machines love to false off the ends of deep iron nails.  We’ve all been there, haven’t we?  (And if you haven’t you ain’t gonna find all the shiny).

Every park I go to, I come back with piles and piles of deep iron nails that were probably iron falses going in, but you have to dig em.

And the one question I always ask is this — why are there so many nails here, deep in the soil of this old park or school?  Did people carry them in their pocket?  Did people bury them as good luck charms?  Were all parks and schools sponsored by a nail manufacturer who gave out free samples?  Did students and teachers at that 1930s schoolyard that has been giving up the shiny and the occasional iron false also smoke iron nails on their cigarette break?

Who knows?  Why so many iron nails in parks and old schoolyards?  They are just everywhere, at every such site, even when most such sites have no evidence of old buildings or other structures which would generate said nails.  I always figured it was from before the park or school use, like from old wagons or other farm equipment that plied the site before it became a park or school, where iron nails would not seem to be really prevalent.  And I just accepted that, sort of an Occam’s Razor explanation.

But, in today’s old farm field, there were no deep iron nails, or deep iron of any kind, despite it being farmed since the 1700s.  So the old farm equipment plying the land before it was a park or school theory just doesn’t wash.  I have no answer as to why there are deep iron nails that sound like silver and silver sites.  Maybe its a semiosis, but I don’t think so.  Maybe an intelligent gamemaster f***ing with me.  Who knows?

Nailed it baby.  Exactly what I wanted to do, especially for an entry that described a hunt that produced nothing.  Just goes to show what the constant drone of the threshold does to your brain.

Pulled a silver Q out of the loose end section from yesterday.  It was in the hole with a huge chunk of high tone sheet metal.  How I heard it, I have no clue.  More likely, I heard the sheet metal, and simply got lucky.

This is the 60th silver pulled from this site.  Are you kidding me?  That’s alot, as these things go.  Next stop is at 65, which would tie it as my 4th best site.  Next named level, “Monster Site” is at 100 silvers (good luck on that one, tho I’ve had 2 sites get to that level).  I never figured this as a 60 silver site, and given that I’ve only covered 30% of the area so far, who knows how far it could go.  You just get the sense, however, that each hunt will be the last to produce, yet each one produces as you move into presumably less and less likely areas.

But, the Q was right on the edge of the presumably filled area.  What if I’m wrong about it being filled?  If I am, there’s 50 silvers in there.  But I’m not.  There’s two at best on the fringe, and that’s it.  But I’m gonna waste a day trying to make that putative filled area produce.

Nor’easter dudded.  They were calling for 4-8 inches in some reports, and we didn’t even get flurries.  Hardly any rain either.  If I were that bad at my job, I’d be out on the streets.

So, take advantage of an unexpected detecting day, and back to the field. Slow going for a while, fewer wheaties, and no silver until about 3 hours in, when I got a ’17 merc.  Quite tarnished, but otherwise would prolly grade VF-XF.  Interesting that at this site, all the silvers and wheaties/IH’s older than 1930 seem tarnished or badly abused, but those newer than 1930 are shiny and clean (even the wheaties, which is rare around here).  Maybe around 1930 they stopped putting fertilizer on the field, or there was some other chemical event.  Who knows? — I am certainly clueless about such things.  I don’t even know if they used chemical fertilizer before 1930.  Observing things like this, and thinking about them will occasionally lead to useful insight into the site — too bad it ain’t happening now.

One thing I discovered in the field today was an old road bed.  Didn’t see it on any old maps, but I’m certain its very old.  Last time I found a road bed in a field, I scored a barber half along it.  I’m having my doubts about getting a big fish here tho; it is so quiet that such seems unlikely, but when I get to the old road, maybe the sound of the site will change and I will get lucky with that big fish.

With about 20 minutes left before I had to get back, I didn’t have enough time to do another rank along the field grid, so I worked on one of the loose end sections right by the supposed filled section; its just a 10 foot wide strip between that section and the field, awkward with trees, and right by a tree pops out a 44S merc, nice and shiny, at only 3 inches deep.   Always be anal and clean up the loose ends at a good site, you never know.

Continuing the gridding of the site of recent entries further into the field, and I finally got a field tell, an old buckle.  Also got a couple of rosies and another sterling ring.  Things are getting thinner and thinner, including a 45 minute stretch without a coin of any type (except a couple of zincolns, and they don’t count), and not much junk either, but experience says press on, and eventually I got the rosies.

The buckle was deep.  I will never hear an old coin at the depth this buckle was, unless it is a half or silver dollar.  If I get a big fish here, that’s what it will be.  We can dream, and that’s what I did, thinking of the flowing hair halfs flying into my pouch.

The weather was beautiful today, 48 degrees, no clouds, no wind.  But a nor’easter is on the way, anywhere from 3-8 inches coming.  Glad I got out today, and toughed it out yesterday; nice to go on hiatus knocking down the silver.

Sadly, there isn’t more. Gridding out a proven site is boring (at least to the reader), but boring is actually good in most endeavors.  Maybe I’ll post that big fish after the snow melts, but I’m not too optimistic on that score.

40 degrees and a fierce chill wind.  I shouldn’t have gone out, but I needed a shiny fix.  Despite wearing 7 layers, it was still miserable, but I toughed it out.  Not the best decision of my life, but what’s done is done.  At least I am able to hunt, and we have to look at the positive.

And it wasn’t a bad hunt — I pulled 2 dimes, 11 wheaties (the oldest, one of the abused greenie meanies, being a 1913), and another abused Chester County IH (on the right — as near as I can tell, its from either the 1800s or the 1900s, but who knows? 🙂  I do know that it has a 1 in the date; unlike most IH’s I pull :)).  Also pulled a sterling silver pinkie ring.

As for the site, it seems to be thinning on clad, but today produced alot of wheaties, more than usual, it seems.  Too bad the silver didn’t keep up with the normal ratios on the wheaties.  Still no field tells, other than the IH and the greenie meenies (I’d like to see one buckle or button or somesuch to think I have hope for a big fish here).  Site has now given up 55 silver coins, which ties it with my 5th best site all time (that would be the one from last fall).  I guess when you have a site like this, you fight the cold to get there every chance you can.

But, there’s more.  There often is.  Just this.  Imagine seeing this at 9 inches (without the hole).  Figured I had myself a deep copper and legitimate field tell, but it just says GHH 683 in big letters on the otherside., That may mean something to someone; too bad that someone isn’t me.

So, back to the project, expanding the grid even farther into the field.  At this point, it becomes a simple statistics game — so long as one in 20 coins is a silver, and so long as for every 2 or 3 wheaties or so you get one, keep grinding for the tells, and so long as they continue to come, the modern silver will continue to fly into your pill bottle.  So that’s what we did, and that’s sort of what happened.

But, there’s more.  There always is, except, in this case, there really isn’t.  It was the most grind it out, uneventful hunt that you could ever imagine.   That’s good, at least IMO, as the hard work to prove the site is long done, and the peaceful experience of grinding out a proven site and pulling a random silver is quite pleasant, at least to me.  I know some others would not have this kind of patience, but to me, it is quite soothing.

Except, of course, in this case there really is more, and that is this — no matter how much we have, we always want more. (We economists have a term for this: “human nature”).  And in this case, its about the field.  We think we have a golden site, grid out for the modern silvers, over a 1700s field, and pick up the old silvers as well.  Given that the parts of the modern site seem to have been lightly detected, it seems reasonable to expect that huge sections of the field have never been detected, so we should be expecting to see the capped bust quarters flying into the pouch from the field, shouldn’t we?

But the tells just don’t seem to be there.  I’m in this 1 silver per 2 hour field now for the big fish, but have not gotten great field tells.  No buckles.  No buttons.  No crotal bells.  But I do take the copper from a couple of days ago, and yesterday’s barber dime as a possible old field tell.  But I’d love to see more field tells.  I see a chance at not only another old timer’s half, but a special big fish here.  This field is huge, near an old town, and probably not skillfully detected. But its hard to tell when to suspend the site for greener pastures, or to keep looking for the big fish here.  I guess so long as this one is giving up the modern silver, you press on.  At least that’s how I’ll start next week.

As for the pic above, that green treasure is an IH.  Once again, a reason why I simply do not care about Indian heads here in the acidic soil of Chester County.  But, maybe its a field tell.  Who knows?  Also dug a 1915 wheatie.  Maybe there is hope for the older silver here, but I think it may be too deep for the mineralization.   Three pre 1916 coins, all in one specific area of the field.  Here’s hoping.

Back to our recent project, expanding the grid further into the wide open field, and there is sort of a quiet area, at the end where the old timer’s halfs may be, and where the 60s clad is, and a quieter than dead area at the other end, but that end is transected by an imaginary line, if you extend the hot zone along it, so you figure you ought to keep doing both.  Besides, really dead quiet open fields can be good, cause you dig every iffy signal; signals you might not even hear above the din of noisier areas.

So, I decide I’ll go one more rank thru the quieter than dead area and back, and if I don’t get a tell, I’ll bag that end, and spend more time where the better tells are.

I get a few iffy signals down there, all of which are ferrous falses, until I get one that pops out a small grey disk which no doubt is a silver dime.  Not only that, there’s no doubt in my mind that its a seated dime, given how deep and tarnished it is.  Seated dimes are so rare for me (I’ve only found 2 in over 20,000 coins), so I’m pretty stoked.  Problem is that it is caked in dirt, and you don;t want to rub the dirt off in case its a valuable date, cause it will show up as cleaned, so I just stuff it in the pill bottle caked in dirt.

This was early in the hunt, and the hunt goes on without much happening, but at least I’m happy I probably have a seated.  Its all I thought about, and it was killing me not knowing til not only after I got home, but after work as well.  I was thinking of all the things I was gonna write about my seated.

Near the end of the hunt, I got a beautiful deep silver quarter signal nearby, and figured, wow, maybe I have a seated or barber quarter as well, but it turned out to be a clad Q.  Are you kidding me?  Everything seems to read high at this site.

I did get a few more deep silver signals, almost all of which turned out to be clad (the worst was a 09-47 to 01-45 near yesterday’s old timer half that was clad), but as can be seen in the above pic, I did squeak in a few modern silvers at the end of the hunt.  That’s 51 now for this site, my 7th site to reach 50 or more, and best site since last fall.

As for the seated, turned out to be a 1901 barber dime.  D’oh!  I was certain I had one, too.  Well, its only my 23rd barber dime, so I suppose I should be happy, but I really wanted that seated, especially after waiting all day to find out.  Oh well.  Be happy with any silver.  And, at least I had the joy of thinking I had a seated most of the day.

Well, tomorrow is Farewell Farewell Friday (which of course is every Friday at a good site, whether I’m ready to farewell it or not).  Just haven’t been able to do that since the last fall, for any number of reasons, including trying to lose weight, not having good sites, bad weather, or so forth.  Got a great restaurant picked out, and it should be fun.  Hopefully my wife can join me.

Geez, botched that one (would have been better if it actually was a seated), but its month end time, and I’ll be working ’til midnight, so I had to be quick.  Maybe it will look better after the morning edit, but silver always looks good, no matter how tarnished, or lame the writing.

Back to the honeyhole, and there are basically 4 choices.  Imagine an L shaped grid that represents the hot zone of recent posts — choice 1 is the inside of the L and is what should be the hottest section, but I believe has been filled.  Out from the bottom of the L is just field, but it goes along an old road towards where an old house was.  Out from the back of the L is field for as far as the eye can see; what used to be old farmland, and where I found yesterday’s copper.  And 4th, just loose ends, connecting the L up to the road, embankments, and so forth.  Wish I should show my Google Earth grid, but I don’t want 50 guys there tomorrow (as if even 5 people read this).

(BTW, here’s an example of how I do my grids for all my sites on Google Earth using the path tool.  Its very handy, tho if I had that CTX 3030, I hear the built in GPS does this automatically; what a sweet feature, if it really works as I would like (this is from another site I don’t care if 50 guys are crawling over tomorrow, have at it)) —

So, the obvious choice is down from the bottom of the L, thru the fields by the old road, towards the old house.  This is also the closest section to the hottest part of the hot zone (the bottom of the L).  But, in a half hour of expanding the grid out that direction, I got zero coins.  Not even clad.  Are you kidding me?  This is 30 feet from a section that gave up over 30 silvers in the past month.  Just 3 high tones — 2 bottlecaps and a piece of copper tubing.  I’ll never figure this game out.  And, assuming the inside of the L is dead as well, go figure?

So,  I cut my losses and expand out from the back of the L into the great expanse of the fields; this is a huge grid rank taking about a half hour for one rank, and things go a bit better.  Clad dime, then a pair of silver dimes back to back.

Near the top of the L is the section where the old timer supposedly buried the halfs, and I actually get one in that area.  Are you kidding me?  It was a weird signal, a 03-46 or 03-48 or something like that, and it turns out to be a silver clad JFK.  I’ve had 28 silver halfs, and 12 clad halfs, but this is my first silver clad half.  Its only 40% silver, but just like a war nickel, it counts (some try to argue that war nickels and other coins with less than 50% silver don’t count, but they can all pound sand.  If it contains one atom of silver, it counts in my book).

So, is this one of the old timer’s halfs?  Who knows?  Its 45 years old, and assuming he was 15 when he buried it, that makes him 60, and that’s about right.  Of course, all the clad in this area was dated 65-71, so it is consistent with that as well.  Occam’s Razor says go with the simplest explanation that fits the facts, and I’m still a bit dubious of that burying the halfs story.  OTOH, for me, silver clad halfs are as rare as bust half dimes, so who knows?  I do know if I find another one over there consistent with the date, I’ll believe the old timer’s story, and think it is really cool.

So, on we go, into the great wide open of the field, and it gets rather quiet, and I keep hoping for a tell that says the action of the hot zone spread even farther into the field, and I get a couple of wheaties, and that’s good, then, also near the old timer zone, I get a beautiful 01-44, which I assume is the second old timer half, and adrenaline is pumping, but it turns out to be a silver Q (not bad of course, but I got this half story in my mind).  I figure at that reading, its gotta be a spill, but it isn’t.  TID is always whacked here, I guess I should just get used to it.

So, perhaps there is some more life at this place, tho it is definitely getting quieter as  I expand out.  Maybe squeeze a couple more out of it, we’ll see.  Then onto the challenge of finding a new place.  That’s the problem with honeyholes, they always end (but I am yet hopeful that I am wrong about the inside of the L being filled).

Back to yesterday’s site.  The weatherman claimed it was getting up to 48 today, but it didn’t even feel close.  No sun, and a biting chill wind.  Felt like it was 28.  Well, at least I’m fortunate enough to detect now as others deal with snow, so I should stop whining about the weather.

I’ll whine about Chester County coppers instead, as that is a favorite topic around here.  Pulled this treasure today.

What’s interesting about it is that it is larger than a large cent or your typical British George II/G III copper.  Its a hefty 17.54 gr, 32mm diameter, and 2mm thick.  Its diameter, at least, is consistent with a couple of the more exotic coppers in the early pages of the Redbook.

(And I swear, before I looked in the Redbook, when I put it under water, it seemed there was a bust with a weird neckline and unusual hair, and the typical wreath on the back; features exactly consistent (along with the diameter), of the birch cent.  It even appears to have lettering on the edge, tho I can only make out what looks like one or two of the letters.  There are only 8 or so known of them, so its not that — amazing what the mind will do when it tries to fit ambiguity.  Too bad I’ll never know what it is (and you don’t want it to be something that rare, cause you feel even worse that it is so abused).  Oh, and if you are a copper expert a know a copper that fits those measurements, please post a comment.

As for silver, continued to work the grid in the same direction per yesterday’s entry, and made up a little on the whacked dime/quarter ratio, pulling 4 rosies, 3 of them barely legal.  We’ll take em.

And the rest of the hunt produced a pic that is even harder on the eyes than that copper.  A massive pile of clad.  Yuck!  That’s $5.50 worth of dirty money.  Are you kidding me?  I haven’t dug that much in a very long time. (Just an interesting fact for those reading who are not detectorists — just those 4 dimes above are worth over $8, compared to that junk below (of course its about the sport, not the money, but I figured I’d point that out for reference)).

I guess that it is statistical revenge, cause up to now, this site has had very favorable clad/silver ratio, but I wasted alot of time digging it today.  Problem was, they were mostly deep and iffy, and many sounded good due to nearby trash and perhaps the added effects of the heavy mineralization.  You gotta dig ’em, and it is painful. You don’t know how many times I was certain I had a silver Q. And, speaking of the Q’s all 13 I dug today were dated 65-71, most 65-67.  Are you kidding me?

Also pulled a silver ring (the one on the left).  The silver cub scout ring on the right was pulled yesterday; forgot about it yesterday’s writeup.

As for working the site, its sort of in who knows? mode now.  I pretty much finished up the last of the most promising section today (which, BTW, took me right into the heart of where the old timer’s halfs supposedly were, got about 3 or 4 good, deep half dollar signals, but lots of wasted adrenaline, as it was all junk).

So, we got a few loose ends here, the section I think is filled/dead, and acres and acres of expanding away from the hot area into nondescript fields.  I got to at least clean up the loose ends, and try a couple of days expanding into those fields, especially given that copper, but it may have given up its last silver today.  Lets hope not, but we’ll see.  43 tho, ain’t too bad.

Frozen dirt and other bad weather, family time, work time, doing the taxes (yuck!, and this marks the latest I’ve ever gotten them done), added up to a whole lot of not detecting.  Last hunt (not counting that 15 minute attempt that got snowed on the other day) was the niner of 2/15, so it was nice to get back in the saddle today, given the 48 degree weather (and you know you are warm-deprived when you celebrate such a hideously low temp).

And it ended well, a dollar day, and we don’t get too many of them.

The last time we were at this site, we thought it might be petering, due to the last two hours of grid extension giving up nothing after 9 silvers at a record run rate.  Moreover, adding a rank to the grid on that snowed out day with not a single coin only added to that sentiment.

So, what did I try today?  Keep extending the grid in that direction.  It was rational, given that it was a) heading into a trashy area; b) heading towards the road; and c) heading into an embankment.  All, experience suggests, its where you want to be, but it ended up in 26 cents in clad, and no wheaties.  Are you kidding me?  Just goes to show that probably everything I’ve written over the last 18 months is garbage, and it is all luck.

So, we all know when to cut our losses, so I tried to expand in the direction where I found that putative vanity silver piece, hoping to find the rest of it.  There was a nice tell at the edge of that side of the grid (a deep 65 Q), but the fish weren’t biting in that direction either. 2 hours in, and not even a wheatie yet.

Fortunately, it is a huge site, and there is one more direction to go (actually 3, one is unknown, and the other leads into the presumed filled area; these for another time, perhaps), so we go in the remaining direction, and keep getting deep clad, and a couple of bottlecaps.  God I love deep bottlecaps. These are the tells, so you go at it and go at it until the shiny comes out, and eventually I got the merc.  Quite an iffy signal, but we’ll take it.  This is the first silver I’ve gotten from this site that is not in the linear flow paradigm as described in previous entries, so there is hope after all.

Not long after the merc, its a strange signal that is quite high tonish, and open it up, and out pops a nickel.  Are you kidding me?  I know there’s high tone in there, (figure its a clad spill), and poke around with the pinpointer, and out pops a silver Q.  Sweet baby!  Poke in again, and again the propointer goes off, and out pops another silver Q.  Got a silver spill goin’, baby!  Poke in again, and another silver comes out, this time a rosie.  But that’s the end of it.  Ties my record largest silver spill at 3, but at 60 cents, is my largest in terms of face value.

So, we continue to work the grid, which is basically skirting around what I think is the filled area, and things are pretty dead.  Also working towards where the old timer says he buried the halfs (not that I believe him, but who wouldn’t give it a try?). Have 2 silver events (feels like a 2 silver day, even tho we have 4, in terms of judging the local density), in this paradigm.  Dead dead dead, until it is almost time to go.  Not enough time to do another rank of the grid, so I just freestyle off the edge of it, and randomly nail a silver Q.  Are you kidding me?  I guess that just opened up continuing the grid that direction.

But it gets even crazier.  Its past time to go, and I just start heading back to the car, which takes me across the previous hot zone (which I believe I’ve gridded out). and I get a slam dunk silver dime silver in the zone I’ve diligently worked.  Are you kidding me?  Silver number 6 on the day.  I feel too embarrassed to write this part up, and it will likely not survive the morning edit.

All I can say was, it was sort of on the edge of the hot zone grid, and sometimes it is tough to remember grid boundaries in featureless fields.  OTOH, as I’m driving home trying to think of the reasons for this miss (as always, thinking of things like channel management), I remember what I wrote re the double digit day: there’s no question in my mind I left a few in the ground.  This one was in that zone.  Geez.  At least I got a lucky do over.  I don’t ever go over my grids again (who has the patience?), so I guess there are more in that zone for the competition.  Ouch.  I guess its true that no site is ever hunted out (at least my grids aren’t apparently).

Well, number 39 from this site, ranking it as my 10th best all time, and just one from officially becoming a honeyhole.  Fascinating site.  If the weather holds, hopefully more updates, and hopefully a post showing all those old timer’s halfs.  We’ll see, as we work the grid in that direction.

And, of course, gotta post it all shinied up —

Alright, here goes.  Lets try not to be as obnoxious as the entry from the other day, but pulling silver is hard, and damn exciting, so sometimes its tough not to be.  The adrenaline takes time to drain sometimes, and it rarely drains by writing time (but of course its all gone by the time of the morning edit).

57 degrees today, and all the snow melted, so back to the prospective honeyhole of recent entries, working the grid towards the road (as opposed to the direction that produced that silver frame thingy and the putative area of the old timer’s buried halfs), and the second noise cancel gives me a channel 3, which is the lowest of the low on my opinion of E-Trac channels, and what I do when I get a crap channel is run in it for about 3 minutes and NC again hoping to get a good one (there is a method to this madness, which I may write up better sometime), but pretty much after I got that NC 3  I got a beautiful silver signal that blew my ears off.  A walker at 3 inches.  Are you kidding me?  And, my first silver ever found on E-Trac channel 3 (yeah, I track this, shouldn’t you?), but of course, a Radio Shack detector could have found this one.  I rarely get slam dunk half dollars, this may be a first (usually they are either deep, affected, or on edge or on the edge of or in out of the box locations of the site).

So that’s a good start, but it gets better.  Merc, then merc, both tough.  This “towards the road section” is both highly mineralized, and trashy, which is a double whammy.  Then we get a beautiful 10-48 which almost always ends well, and this one did — not one, but 2 silver quarters in the hole.  At first, it looked like one was clad, and one was silver, but fortunately they both came in shiny.  Rock on, baby! and it wasn’t even lunch time.

But it gets even better, if you can believe it.  Silver #6 was a slam dunk rosie, and #7 was a silver Q awkwardly positioned between two pieces of iron.  I ran over, ran over, ran over that signal trying to separate it, and eventually just dug in, unable to pinpoint, hoping for the best, not one of my better plugs (and my plugs are usually masterpieces), but I got the damn thing.  Sometimes better to be lucky that good.  While I never saw a good number, I always heard a good sound, and E-Trac newbies have to pay attention to this point — its about “that sound”, not so much about the numbers.  That’s why I rarely post numbers in my writeups (aside the fact that I usually don’t remember them).

So we’re thinking we got a double today, and not soon after, silver #8 comes in, an iffy merc that all I honestly remember about was that after I dug the plug, it somehow ended up in the grass beside the plug.  Quite a problem to find, but we’ll take it.

At this point, I had 8 silvers by 12:30.  A 4 per hour run rate, and that’s not accounting for my lunch.  Are you kidding me?  I think that’s unprecedented for me.

But things slowed down, and silver #9, another Q, came in a half hour later.  I still had an hour an a half before I had to get back, so there was little doubt about getting a double.

But it was not to be.  The next 90 minutes produced plenty of deep wheaties and clad, and many moments of “here it is, baby!”, but here it wasn’t.  The worst was when I got a beautiful deep 06-48, and this is at a site that has been coughing up silver, so you know its gonna be a silver, and it was two high tone buttons.  Are you kidding me?  D’oh!

So, that’s that.  A 9 silver day, but a $1.90 day was well.  Sort of like a 19 silver day, if you think about it.  My 5th best day in terms of face value, all time.  We’ll take it.  Who wouldn’t?

But, there’s more.  There always is.  This direction of grid towards the road seemed dead after the entry of the other day.  I was ready to call it a 25 silver site.  Then, I hit another hot zone, then more dead.  What’s happening, I think, is that in the hot zones, the bedrock is shallow, and in the dead zones, the bedrock is deep.  That’s been my digging experience.  So, it might not be a case of “what was going on in these hot zones”, but more a case of the “silver has sunk beyond detecting range” in the dead zones.  Who knows?  This still doesn’t explain the linear path of the silvers along my grid, which after a few hunts here, I’ve finally got going the right direction.

Weird and interesting site, but now seemingly dead in the direction of the grid towards the road.  Still have the direction of the silver thingy, and the old-timers halfs, and overall have covered only about 3% of the site (tho I feel by far the hottest section).  At 33, close to hitting my original call of 35, and blowing out my revised call of 25.  Could still end up be a honeyhole, tho, we’ll see, and lets hope so.

And lets see that shiny all cleaned up —

Nailed this one baby (and no, I didn’t nail that trainwreck from the other day, but at least kept my word not to edit it).  I like this one tho; I don’t think I’ll be editing it.

And besides, who has the time?  Tomorrow morning (and all day, and all weekend), is a Celtic festival I’ll be at, which will not only feature Barleyjuice (previously blogged about), but Brother and Albannach as well.   Tribal Celtic fusion.  Are you kidding me?   Too bad I don’t have the time to blog about the latter two, but google and download the sound.  You will not be disappointed.

Sitting at home watching the snow melt today. unbelievable that others were out detecting in the sleet and snow last night.  My feet get cold and my machine gets wacky.  Some people are certainly more hardcore that I am.

Anyway, I posted pics of that thingy from yesterday to my Facebook group.  Piece of a picture frame, piece or trim of a mirror, trim from a vanity (I don’t even know what a vanity is, but I imagine it is in the mirror space), were some of the guesses.  All sound reasonable to me.  Maybe there are many more pieces of it to be found; I found it very near the end of the day.  We’ll see.  I don’t have much luck on that sort of thing, but I did once find both of a pair of silver earrings.

Alot goin’ on here.  Didn’t have time to think of a cool title, but the one we’ve got seems fine for a metal detecting blog, doesn’t it?  Lets try to nail this one without a tomorrow morning edit (cause who has the time?); here goes (can we do it in under 10 minutes? we’ll see) —

Running at 6 AM and the ground is rock hard frozen, and they are calling for a winter storm to hit around 2PM, so lets see if we can squeeze some dirt fishing in between.  Headed for the site of 01/31 which gave up a double (who wouldn’t, free of constraints?), and the ground was like chocolate pudding when I got there.  Rock on, baby!

As I recall from the last hunt, I pulled 9 silvers rather quickly, and as I tried to expand the grid further, pulled in a couple more, but it was a struggle.  Figured that direction was somewhat beat, but it didn’t have much to go to butt up against the area I figured was filled (from my prospecting at the first hunt at this site), so I decided to start off by closing that off, just to be anal.

And I pulled 2 silvers and 4 wheaties in the first 15 minutes.  Are you kidding me?  No question in my mind that I left a couple in the ground re my 01/31 entry due to the adrenaline of the prospect of a double (was swinging too fast, no doubt), but what is done is done.  Happy to take a 2 spot, cause silver coins are hard to find, and one silver day is a good day.

Closed off the grid against the contoured area which I’ve assumed is the fill, and not much happening ’til I got quite close, and got a deep 12-40, and to my surprise, pulled an Indian head.  I don’t pull too many Indian heads (this is only my career 25th, compared to 32 silvers just this year) for various reasons (some guys are excited by them; I’m not one of them, but I’ll leave that for another day).  The thing about this find was that it was kinda odd, cause a), its not an IH old kinda site (but anything built on 300 year old farmland is possible), and b) IH’s are usually at a quite lower CO number.  I’ll chalk it up to difficult TID at this site (more on that later, maybe, since this is a no edit take).  In any case, here it is, in all its beauty  (are you kidding me — some folks get excited about these; they obviously do not live in Chester County) (OK, enough editorializing; I know guys get on my shit for getting excited about 64 roses (and believe me, I do); to each their own)  —

So now I’m looking at a grid working out from a hot zone that seems dead in all directions, but got 2 sides going into hundreds and hundreds of acres of field, and one side going towards the road.  Which way would you go?

Duh?  Its actually a tough choice, cause the road is obvious, but, as such, the area by the road is obvious to the competition as well.  On the other hand, the great wide open fields are an obvious no go, but are so peaceful (and remember the story in my comments from the 01/31 entry; the prospect of finding the half dollars buried by the old timer, which are more in the field direction)..

So of course I go for the road direction, cause its trashier, and trash is your friend. If the detecting is hard, you have a better chance.  And while the grid in that direction was much more sparse than in the hot zone, I did manage to pull a merc (next to some sort of large high tone trash, which managed to mask it, I imagine, for some of the competition with machines with slower separation), giving me my third silver coin of the day.  Also pulled a 7.5 gram silver ring that was under a memorial penny.  Got it on the rescan (and it sounded like a silver Q; d’oh!).  Note to newbies — always rescan your holes.  Of course you do, don’t you?

But, there’s more.  Of course, there always is.  First, lets honor the promise to talk about target ID.  It was brutal.  It was random.  I dug 13 wheaties, and a hideous 17 memorial pennies.  Are you kidding me?  Many sounded quite sweet.  I also dug 5 clad dimes and one clad quarter.  Economists love looking at stats, and the first one that jumps out is just one clad Q against all those other coins.  That’s good — it shows I was lucky enough to hear high tones the competition was missing (one in 5 to one in 6 coins is normally a clad Q).  OTOH, clad and wheaties were sounding like silver in many cases, which is why I wasted so much of my precious day digging them.  I think what is happening is that the particular characteristics of this site (high particle mineralization), are adding to the target.  I was also digging plenty of high conductive coins (copper pennies), at FE numbers that did not drop lower than 25.  Just like the last time I was here, when I dug a silver dime with a high FE number.  Sometimes it just works out that way.  Beware, and be open minded when the site has weird ground.  Or, maybe it was my settings.  Or maybe the big unit. Or maybe the alignment of the planets.  Who knows?  Just be open minded and flexible, and most importantly, lucky.

So, the actual more for the “but, there’s more”, is this thing, a silver relic.  This was in the direction of the wide open fields when I got burnt out working the trashy direction towards the road.  I have no clue what it is, but it looks really old.  Firstly, its tarnished (and most of the coinage I’ve pulled here is not), and it is not stamped, which means it is older than 1905.  If you know what it is, please comment (fingers provided for perspective (sorry, had to say that :))).

So, this today was my 24th silver coin from this site, ranking it 13th all time for me in terms of sites.  The interesting thing about sites that get to 21 silvers for me (the “possible honeyhole” level), they almost always get to the “honeyhole” level at 40 silvers.  Weird how that works, and why I have my levels where they are, but I’m still calling this a 25 silver site.  We’ll see, and hopefully it is more like a honeyhole.  That will take finding the old-timer’s buried halfs.  Good luck with that.

Nailed this one baby! (tho it took more like 20 minutes.  Maybe just start posting: here’s the silver; cause who has the time to both read and write this?).  Anyway, here are the cleaned finds (forgetting whatever that silver relic is, cause that was processed separately) —

Should have waited one more day to post, and avoided yesterday’s totally lame post, cause today we can just as easily do the same, but at least I was able to detect today, and this one involves silver.  Gotta love it, squeezing in the silver on the days you can.

Ground seemed to be thawing more, and as much as I am aching to get back to my 11 silvers on 1/31 site, I decided heading south or east was a good idea, and, given that I had errands in that direction anyway, in was the obvious choice for what was promising to be a mid 40s and sunny day, with thawed ground (at least in that direction).

Hit a site I last remember hitting in the fall of 2011.  This site is a bit of a shrine for me, as it played a big part in my longest consecutive silver streak (52 hunts a row), and I remember one day scrambling for hours at this site to keep the streak alive, and pulled it out with a merc with just 10 minutes left before I had to get back to work.   This is also the same town where I did 112 silvers in 17 days at a different site (and wrote it up for Minelab back in the fall of 2011), so the town is quite a shrine as well (that site ended up producing 140 silvers, and it is still not closed, tho it is probably mostly dead).  Needless to say, it is by far my largest producing municipality.  (Too bad I wasn’t blogging in those days; tho I did take copious notes and pics, and one day may write it up, but who has the time?).

Anyway, onto the detecting.  I proceeded to build out from the grid I built in the fall of 2011, but seemed to be dying out, as it was going from more dense to low density sections, but experience tells us that even these low density sections have the occasional random silver.

The mineralization was tough.  I could not get auto rec above 20.  I don’t remember this being a problem in the past at this site, but I could be wrong.  What I was getting was moderately deepish clads and wheaties (but no deep quarters) — deepish clad is usually a good tell.  Deep clad quarters usually an even better tell.  What this was telling me was that the big unit was getting deepish, small high tone targets that the competition was missing (the competition was obviously getting the deepish quarters), but, on the other hand, I was struggling to hit these targets (most of the signals were very iffy), and in fact, both the silver cross pendant and the merc and the clads were not extraordinarily deep (as these things go compared to other sites) — (tho I am certain the cross was on its side; not sure about the merc, cause I just pulled a deep pile of dirt onto my drop cloth, and there she was).  (If you managed to parse that massive run on, congrats!).

What this all lead to was conflicting thoughts.  Maybe I’m getting deeper stuff here that others missed.  OTOH, I was struggling on the deep ones (that didn’t really seem that deep in an absolute sense), so maybe the smaller pro coil is a better choice at a consistently highly mineralized site than the big unit.  It has never felt like an issue before, but it did today.  Too bad I didn’t have both so I could swap out and test (not that I would have wanted to — I’m both lazy and impatient, but the scientist in me wants to get this right),

Anyway, today’s merc puts this as a 20 silver site.  Not bad. Want to get back to my double digit site tho, so it may be a while before I’m back in this area.  Unfortunately, weather looks foul going forward, so we’ll see what happens next.

Well, I didn’t nail this one, but at least it won’t require the traditional next morning edit.

Tried to get out for the first time this month today.  Valley Forge Park, were I run in the morning, seemed mostly thawed, which made me optimistic, but the site I went to today was totally frozen, which surprised me, since it has full, all day exposure to the sun.  I didn’t bother to try to go anywhere else around here, since there is a thin layer of snow everywhere, which suggests that it is still frozen everywhere.

Thought about hitting a tot lot today.  Haven’t done that since I was a newbie.  Still not that desperate, tho.  When is the last time anyone has found silver in a tot lot?  (Though, unbelievably, I found a V nickel in one when I was a newbie.  Are you kidding me?).

A few guys around here are getting out.  They’ve commented that the ground is not frozen where they are hunting.  I’m not sure where that is, but it must be to the east and south of me.  Some guys also dig the frozen dirt.  I’m not one of them.  I figure I’m gonna run out of silver producing sites sooner rather than later, so might as well enjoy them when it is 70 and sunny.

Supposed to be 50 today.  50 my curvy butt.  Lucky if we get above 39.  But its not gonna get too cold at night, so, if we can get the sun beating down for a few days, it might thaw this week.  In any case, may try to head east tomorrow to a couple sites I’ve worked pretty good, but have not finished, and a couple of prospective sites in the same township.  We’ll see.

So, I’ve spent the downtime working extensively on my music collection  — stressing over important issues such as whether, Elvis, Fine Young Cannibals, or Rusted Root has recorded the best version of Suspicious Minds, and which one to download.  In the unlikely event that you are a big music fan and spend alot of time working your collection, chime in on your opinion of that question (I gave my family a ear test on the question, and discussing the results turned out to be quite interesting).

And, if you don’t have a streaming service, and want a good one, use MOG.  If you click on this link and sign up (its free), I get even more free music (and like MLM, you can do the same).  Shameless incentivized promotion for sure, but what’s the harm?  Its fun to play along once in a while.

Well, this may be the last entry before the ground thaws and I actually find some silver again (unless I do a Wiz-War entry in the meantime, which is well overdue).

Yesterday I thought I had a chance at a double digit day, but didn’t come close.  Nailed it today tho, baby!

So, in yesterday’s entry, I tried to articulate (probably poorly), how my grid seemed to be running perpendicular to a hot zone.  That is, as I transected the grid across the piece of the site I thought was most promising, the silvers seemed to show up in a line at one particular place in the transect.

So, its like duh, why wouldn’t you just change your grid to run into the putative intersecting hot zone?  Easy to say, but it does take a couple of days of gridding to get a visual picture of the site, especially when the aerials and other research don’t give you any reason to believe in said putative linear hot zone.

So today was the day, brutally cold and windy, to set up a grid around the presumed hot zone.  And it worked.  Hot dog, baby!  Started at 10:30, and after I pulled my 6th silver, looked at my watch, and it was only 12:00.  Are you kidding me?  That’s a rare run rate, and I was too giddy to do the math.  You can’t get an adrenaline like this from other games (at least the ones I’ve played).  Not only that, after I looked at my watch, pulled my 7th on the day just 5 minutes later.  Are you kidding me?

At that point is was 2 Q’s and 5 mercs, giving me a dollar day, which are rare enough, but I wanted a double.   I mean, it was only noon after all (and I skipped lunch, being on this roll, wouldn’t you?).

And it wasn’t much longer before I pulled a another merc and a rosie, the latter of which didn’t come in with an FE number lower than 25 on the E-Trac.  Its the sort of target many would not have dug, and I may have been among them, except it had that sound and that precise pinpoint, and the ground is rough, so you gotta pull it, especially when you are on a roll, and the adrenaline is flowing and the prospect of a double is in the air.  9 at this point, baby.

But the 10th took some work.  I was getting a ton of good high tones, but they turned out to be high tone trash, wheates, or a stray clad.  I know I was swinging too fast, as the adrenaline was pumping.  I kept saying to myself: SLOW DOWN!  You have an E-Trac.  If you see the coil is moving, you are swinging too fast.

Then I got some good luck that looked like bad luck at first.  A local came over to talk to me.  I generally don’t like it when people come up to talk to me (always the prospect of park people or some asshole with a ‘tude), but it actually almost always ends well in my experience, and this was no exception.  I hope to have more to write about this local’s conversation later (as it was way cool), but the proximate effect was to slow me down, and get me to stop thinking about the double.

And at 1:24, I got a beautiful deep 11-47 which I was certain was a deep silver Q, and turned out to be my first walker of the season.  10 silvers in less than 3 hours!  Are you kidding me?  And wait ’til you see this walker.  Nothing trumps the site of deep, big silver in the hole.

Got another rosie a bit later for my 11th of the day, and as I moved away from the linear hot zone, got not much more on the day.  I was, at this point, moving towards a section that previous prospecting suggested was dry, and it was.  And it sounded that way.  The cold biting wind, and 11 silvers pulled gave me a nice excuse to call it a day.

21 from this site now.  I’m gonna downgrade it to a 25 site from a 35 site, however, as there is no evidence of anything outside this narrow band, and the endpoints of the band seem tapered.  What you do is try to construct why a site is as it is from the evidence, use the reconstruction to guide your detecting, and find more silvers based on this reconstruction (an article on this, called “flow paradigms”, seems appropriate, but is for another day).  But, its a huge site, so maybe more than the estimate will be forthcoming.  We’ll see.  And, I have not clue why there is this strip of silvers across a huge site.  I’m still expecting some scattereds, but it will take some patience working more low density areas.

A note on the weather.  It was brutal.  A cold, icy wind.  But when you have a 6 silver day yesterday, and belief in more from the site, and are getting them, you have to do it.  You tough it out.  Who wouldn’t?

But wait, there’s more.  When you drop a double, the adrenaline doesn’t let up, and you feel the need to keep writing.  In this case, it is actually a tip, which I meant to post yesterday, (and yeah, its more on noise cancel, but here it is):  If you get an iffy target, go as close to the target as you can to get a clean threshold, do a noise cancel, then go back over the target.   Most times, the target will ID better.  The principle here is that you wan the channel that works best in the local target’s dirt.  Try it.  It works (at least for me, in our highly variable soil).

So, lets look at that shiny cleaned up, and then that beautiful walker (which, unfortunately, seems a bit out of focus).

Well, I didn’t nail this one, but when you have a day like today, sometimes you just don’t care, baby!

Yesterday was the first day I was able to test my replacement big unit.  It was warm (58 degrees), but the ground was still frozen solid (that happens after 10 days of sub 20 weather).

I went to a park with a large hunted out field, just to make sure I heard the blissful sound of threshold hum and the occasional clad, then into the woods at the same park to some ruins that have produced 3 of my best 30 finds; an extremely difficult, iron infested site. (and come to think of it, I’m not sure any other site can claim 3 of my top 30 finds).

Anyway, the coil purred like a kitten in the hunted out section, and seemed to work acceptably in the difficult section, tho I found nothing of note in either place.  At least I was able to get the test out of the way on a throw away day with the ground frozen.  Why do coils go bad?  Who knows? I hope this one doesn’t go bad like the last one.

Anyway, today was the big test, to see if the new big unit could score silver at a site marked as a prospective honeyhole, where the pro coil scored 4 silvers on 1/17.  Its a difficult site to work: the mineralization is brutal, and there is lots of iron, so you are constantly wondering about iron falses vs mucked up deep silvers.  But it was 66 degrees today, so you have to give it a go, don’t you?

And it did not go well initially.  The first hour produced little, just three clads, and lots of chatter from the coil.  But, the coil sounded like it usually does at hard sites with the man cranked, tho I was wondering if the pro coil might have been a better choice for the site, given the smaller footprint in the high mineralization, and given that it found 4 silvers last time.

But I have faith in the big unit (when it is working), and my faith was eventually rewarded with a merc and a worn barber right next to each other (no doubt the same event).  Not only that, scored a couple of rosies in the next half hour to complete the trifecta in just 2 hours, all before lunch.  Are you kidding me?  I rarely get trifectas.  At this point, I’m looking at a 2 per hour site, and thinking double digit day.

But it was not to be.  After lunch it went slowly, I pulled another merc and then a Q just near the end of the day.  Total of 6 silvers in 4.5 hours.  Any time you can get 1 per hour plus is fantastic, but that special experience of the rarefied air of a 2 per hour honeyhole was not to be, at least not today.

I’m not sure what to think of the site going forward.  Its produced 10 silvers in 2 hunts, but it is hard to read.  I already wrote about the possibly filled section on 1/17.  All of the silvers were sort of in a line, which my rectangular (and perpendicular) grid transected.  The obvious thing is to grid along that line, rather than perpendicular to it, but why are all the silvers in a line like that?  Who knows?  Who knows what the site has going forward.  Still sounding like a 5-35 silver site.  Its huge, but the area producing the silvers is quite small.  We’ll see, if the weather holds up.

One more note on the big unit.  Dug just 5 wheaties today.  Gotta love it.  The previously blogged entries here before the ground froze using the pro coil noted a large uptick in wheaties relative to silvers.  While any economist will tell you that this is not a large enough sample size, just anecdotally we see an uptick in wheaties with the pro coil, and a downdick with the big unit.  Its simple.  While I’m not ready to claim the big unit gives better depth, I am willing to claim that it give better TID at depth, allowing us to leave those wheaties for the competition (and I did that today, choosing not to dig several of them, that I doubt I would have had the confidence to ignore with the pro coil).  My stats since using this coil bear this out.  I just hope that its does not go bad.

Ok, enough intellectual BS.  Gotta see that shiny cleaned up; may be quite a while before I drop another sixspot.

Got my replacement Detech 13 today.  Nice one KellyCo — no hassles on getting me the replacement at all.

Of course, I can’t use it.  They are saying warmer weather early next week, but I’m not sure it will be enough for the ground to thaw; we’ll see.

My concern is that there is an underlying problem with the engineering of this coil, and it may go bad as well.  Only time will tell.  I once owned a non Minelab machine, and went thru two bad coils on that machine due to systemic engineering issues, and called it a day with that coil, that machine, and that company.  I do not have alot of tolerance for products that fail.  I hope it was just bad luck with my first Detech 13, and not a systemic problem.  If it does fail, I’m not sure what I’ll do for a large coil — maybe a big SEF (also made by Detech, but I’ve never heard of any issues with it).

Looks like I’m done for a while.  They say we won’t be above 30 or for a couple of weeks, and may be getting a big snowstorm.  That’s just as well, I guess, got out today for the first time since Friday, and it was miserable cold.   Ground is starting to freeze — in that state now where the first inch or so is frozen — won’t be long ’til its all rock hard.

Today’s hunt was lousy, 5 wheaties and nothing shiny.  Its a close by site — wanted to go to Friday’s site, but it is far and didn’t want a long drive in case it snowed today.  Today’s site was one I discovered over Christmas week, and have yet to get a silver out of, tho I think I have at least 10 wheaties there.  This is a place one of my acquaintances told me he worked hard for a period of 2 months and dug everything, so I am determined to get a silver out of there, more for curiosity’s sake than anything else.  So far, it looks like he did get them all (the main part is totally dead so far), tho I am getting some deep high tones around the edges of the site.

We’ll see, might be a month or more before I am out there again, and this is a low priority project for when I need something close.

Alot goin’ on here.  Lets try to nail it.  Not too optimistic on that score, but we’ll see.

First off, the title refers to a hideous statistic that dates back to my last entry (1/15), and that is 17 straight wheaties dug without a silver coin.  Are you kidding me?  Hell could not be worse.

On 1/15, we dug a merc, then 8 wheaties, then whined about it (wouldn’t you?).  Rained on 1/17, had to work most of the day 1/18, but found some time to get out to a local park I’ve never been to, and would never plan to be to, except that it was close, and had not the time to travel far, so I hit it up, and dug 4 more wheaties.  Site has promise actually, given the deep high tones I dug, but it is a project for another day.

But today it was 34 degrees and windy, the perfect day to stay inside, except when driving home from Tuesday’s site, I drove by a field and said to myself — that’s a 25-75 silver site.  Finally I had a day to attack it (after spending the rainy day Wednesday at the court house to see if the site was public property), and attack it today I did, in 6 layers (those who read me know I consider 80 degrees cold; I’m in my comfort zone at 95 and humid).

But it did not start well.  I found only 2 coins in the first hour, a wheatie and a clad dime.  But the wheatie was good, I guess.  The one thing I did notice was that the ground was lumpy, and this was supposed to be an old baseball field (yeah, I cheated, there is more to the game than just driving by, I looked at the old aerials as well).  Baseball fields aren’t lumpy, so I figured the evil fill and grade twins had been here (well, just fill in this case), so I focused my attention right along the road where some old trees were.  Fill and grade don’t mess with those).  When I was nailing deep clad there, I surmised the problem with the baseball field area was indeed fill and grade, rather than that hunted, and his sister out, had paid a visit.  I was in business (at least in terms of solving part of the site).

The trick was to find a part of the site where fill and grade hadn’t been, and with alot of terraced grading at the site, you just use your detector and listen for high tones.  Eventually I got a section where there were some more wheaties (4 more to be exact), giving me 17 in a row with no silver, but at least the ground seemed natural (or more accurately, graded before the silver era usage).

Finally, I got me an 11-45 which I knew was a silver (it had “that sound”, as E-Trac users know), then another, then the Q.  Are you kidding me?  17 wheaties in a row, then 3 silvers.  Yes, I was “due”, but economists/statisticians will tell you that that is “gambler’s fallacy” to be “due”, but well take it.  Not only that, pulled a 5 gr silver ring as the next target (yeah, there are 4 silver coins in the pic, hopefully I’ll close that off, we’ll see).

So, of course you are going to set up a grid in this area, (after the first hour produced just 2 coins in a different area), and that went ok.  I pulled 9 more wheaties, and as the final target of the day, another rosie (which is the 4th rosie in the above pic).  14 wheaties and 4 silvers on the day, coupled with 12 wheaties and 1 silver over the previous 2 days.  Ouch.  I want my new Ultimate 13 (tho, admittedly, most of this ratio failure is not the fault of the pro coil, but due to prospecting (where we dig more wheaties than normal at new sites), and brutal mineralization at the current site (where TID fails so you have to dig em all), and just bad luck (I guess, anyway, or lack of focus/distraction due to the brutal cold wind).

At least a couple of the wheaties were old (a ’10 and a ’17).

Going forward, this site is huge, but the best part appears to have been filled.  I’m downgrading it to a 5-25 silver site, we’ll see.  (Too bad it looks like the ground will freeze next week; might be a while before we get back).

As for the rest of this entry, was gonna do some killer Friday Afternoon Album entries, but I’m shot.  And of course, this entry is way to long as it is, but I mostly nailed it.  Just have to drop a cleaned up pic of that shiny, cause its my first multi day of the year.

Went to a new site today, an old park in the middle of nowhere.  The village it is in is very small, but it has a baseball field on the old aerials, so you never know.

As expected, density was an issue, as I pulled only 2 coins in the first hour of hunting.  At least one of them was a merc — nice to see a merc for a change.  Decided to set up a grid around where I found the merc, and pulled 8 wheaties and no more silver.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about a ratio killer.  And the frustrating thing is that some of them sounded quite good.  One was an 09-48 which I figured for a slam dunk silver Q (turns out there was a pull tab piece in the hole, and I was getting that adding effect due to my deep on, fast off setting).

Outside the wheaties, pulled just 4 other clads, for a total of 13 coins in 4 hours.  And this is a public park.  Talk about low density.  The site is rather large, and just screams for my big unit, which is on its way to KellyCo.  I think this site needs to be tabled ’til I get a new one back, tho I don’t get terribly excited about a 1 in 4 hour site.  Can’t judge a site on just one hunt, tho.

Its been a rough few days.  Friday was a rough hunt, as previously blogged, no detecting Saturday, but Sunday I decided at the last minute to go to a group hunt.  It was supposed to be 60 degrees, after all.  Who wouldn’t want to be out detecting?

I had low hopes for the hunt, given that the site was 800 acres of mostly nothing (fields and woods), with old cultural features sprinkled in for those who did the research.  I didn’t do the research, cause I didn’t think I was gonna go, but decided to go just for the social aspect.  Its fun to hang with 50 local detectorists, after all, even if you find nothing.

I found nothing, despite finding several old cultural features, and giving them quite an intense go.  I did find a big pile of metal detecting trash that some other asshole dropped at one of them; no wonder the hobby is banned by park people.

I think about 5 people, maybe a couple more, found a silver or copper.  I wasn’t one of the 10-20% on this day.  Is it skill or luck?  I dunno, all I can say is that those who did find something are people who I consider skillful.  They found what they found near cultural features.  Not like finding a random reale in the middle of a 100 acre field (I’ve actually done that, cause what I generally do is luck).  So, skill takes the day, and it wasn’t me.   (I did find a clad dime in the middle of a 100 acre field on the day, talk about a sort of ironic luck, if there is such a concept).

So, I left, not cause I wasn’t finding anything, and knew I wouldn’t find anything, but cause it was too damn cold, and some of my friends were leaving as well.  60 my curvy butt.  45 tops, and a cold 45 at that, with fog, mist, clouds, and drizzle.

But after lunch I decided to hit a backup site, and that is when things went from miserable to worse.  I kept getting CO 01 on pretty much everything.  It was constant.  Even when holding the coil in the air.  I was finding clad, but nothing deep.  I wondered about a coil or machine issue.

I moved to a backup backup site, and it was even worse.  I went to a third site 5 miles away, more of the same — constant low tones at CO 01, no matter what you do.  I went to a site 5 minutes from my house that I know very well, and is totally hunted out (cause I was the one who hunted it out), and the dirt is very clean and there is no EMI, and tested the machine there, still the same.  Some part of my rig failed.  No wonder I couldn’t find anything.

Monday, swap out the big unit Ultimate 13 for the stock coil, and she’s purring again.  Hit a nice deep target which I figure is either a wheatie or bottlecap, and put the big unit back on, and its as quiet as a mouse.   Nails the bottlecap with better TID than the stock coil, and I figure my coil troubles are behind me.

Decide to then go hunt a police station to test the coil (wouldn’t you?  Ok, that was totally random, but that’s what happened. Think about it — they are generally public property and part of the municipal park system, and sometimes in old buildings, and who is gonna bother you?  Its not like you are skulking from the cops (and, in my experience, police officers tend to be very interested in MD’ing).  (And besides, one of my best all time finds was at a police station). They also tend to be very trashy, cause not many people hunt them, and it seemed the perfect place to stress test the possibly dysfunctional coil.

But, the coil seemed to work fine, until it didn’t.  Got a rosie and a couple of wheats at the police station, but then the machine went haywire, in a sort of different way (not just constant low tones, but all sorts of tones).  Since the site was so trashy, it was hard to tell what was going on, so I decided to move on to a hunted out park to eliminate some of the uncertain variables and work on my machine again.

(Why do I bother?  Its not even in focus.  And we’ve all seen rosies before.  I should just cycle the same stock rosie pic).

And at the hunted out park, the coil was toast.  Constant low tones even while holding it in the air.  The stock coil was fine (and I’ll tell you, it is a pain in the ass to switch them for these tests).  I found a nice deep wheatie with the stock coil, which the Ultimate 13 could barely hear.  Ouch.  This may explain the issues I wrote about Friday.

Well, I had a high opinion of the Ultimate 13, but it seems it went bad on me, so I have to withdrawal all previous opinions for now.  KellyCo says send it back and they’ll send me a new one, so I may soon be writing about KellyCo’s service (good or bad, depending on how it goes, and right now, I’m expecting it to be good).  I still like the Ultimate 13, and what I’ve found with it, and hope a new one restores my confidence.

So, for now, its back to the pro coil.

Oh my, totally missed this one, should have done a Friday afternoon album instead, or relayed some conversations with my competition about parks we have both hunted recently (which was totally interesting).  But sometimes you just have to document what is going on, as tedious as it is.

Frustrating hunt yesterday, and my first of the year without scoring a silver.  And I felt like I got everything right, too.  Was hitting deep wheaties, deep clad, bottlecaps, even a couple of deep 200 year old copper buckles, all the tells you could want, but sometimes you just don’t get the girl.  Oh well.

Based on getting 6 wheaties, I should have gotten 2 silvers, and that is what I expected when the hunt started.  I did, by far, get the most deep coins yesterday of any hunt here (digging 8-9 inch clad is frustrating, cause it can sound so good), and more diligent channel management seems to be helping, but, I think I’ll give this site a rest for a while, and look for greener pastures.  I’ll come back someday, as there are still some edge/out of box sections to do.

I did pull a small (1.5 gr) sterling silver ring as a consolation prize.

Yesterday back to the same site as the previous days, and gave equal time to the older section where I found the copper, and the graded section near the ball field where the modern silvers were.

Not much near where copper was except for a couple of wheaties, but scored a 1940 Q near the ball field.  Nice to get a silver other than a rosie this year.

It was under this rock, which isn’t a huge rock, but but you wonder how a coin dropped in the 50s sinks under a rock (that is literally older than dirt), at all.  Get a pot of dirt, put a quarter on it, put a rock 3 inches down directly under it, sit it on your kitchen table, and check it in 50 years.  Bet the quarter is still on the top.

But out there, the way coins (and rocks), move and shift around it amazing.  (I once found a wheatie directly under a 4×6 inch rock (1 inch thick) in an area I believe has never been disturbed).  Its not intuitive, but I have theories on why this happens.  And I also have theories on how understanding this (or at least thinking you understand it), can help your detecting.  I don’t have time to write it all up, but the executive summary is coins won’t sink as far in shady areas, and areas where the grass is old and unhealthy, and rocky areas.  My results bear this out — I do much better where the grass is weaker than where there is a thick, healthy carpet (part of the dynamic is the fact that grass decomposes to soil, earthworms, grubs, burrowing mammals, water/ice, and so forth play in the dynamic also.  All for another day).

One thing for today is more on noise cancel, tho. I can’t reiterate how important this is on the E-Trac (at least around here).  I went about 45 minutes yesterday without digging a single target.  Of course the site is sparse, and I do not like to dig, cause digging is expensive, but that was ridiculous.  I even dropped my digger over the coil to make sure the machine was still working.

Eventually I got a real crappy CO 27 to 37 at about 4 inches, not likely to be anything good, but I needed to dig something, and it turned out to be a wheatie at 4 inches, in decent shape.  Are you kidding me?  Got something similar nearby, this time I remembered to noise cancel, and it came in loud and clear, like it should.  Shifted back to the old channel, and it was a crap signal.  I know this stuff matters, but I haven’t seen such a stark case in a while, as I am usually pretty good about it.  Maybe it was something local to the site.

I usually noise cancel about 20-30 or so times a hunt, but I made a conscious effort to do so more often yesterday, including on each iffy target.  I probably NC’d about 40-50 times, and it helped.  I was hitting deep ones moreso than other days at the site (too bad they were all very deep clad.  Grrr) and dug more coins today than any other day here.  Now, who is to know it is not a shift in density?  You don’t without more scientific method outside the couple of targets I did do, but its not.  Noise cancel and channel management matters on the E-Trac.

Well, too bad I couldn’t turn it into a multi-silver day.  5 hunts here recently (6 overall), and just one silver each.  But, any silver day is a good day.

Yesterday I speculated about the possibility of pulling an old coin from the sparsely-targeted 50s park I’m working due to finding a couple of old flat buttons.

The past couple of hunts there, I’ve found a couple of rosies near the baseball field, but fill and grade were there in the 50s when they built the field, so I wasn’t expecting much older than that there.  Further out, in the more naturally contoured section, I found the flat buttons.  Being that this section is closer to a road that I believe is at least 200 years old, I decided to focus there and hope to score an oldie (and still score some more modern silver, as that was part of the park in the 50s as well), rather than work closer to the ball field.

It seemed like a mistake.  I spent nearly 4 hours in older flat button section, gridding it carefully, and got bupkis.   I got some constructive stuff, like deep clad and deep bottlecaps (those that read me know there is nothing better than finding deep bottlecaps (other than the goods themselves, of course)), but nada in the old coin department.  I couldn’t even muster a wheatie.  I decided to do one more rank of the grid, and if I don’t get a least a wheatie in that rank, I’m going elsewhere.

I did get a wheatie just at the end of that rank, but decided to go elsewhere anyway.  I hit the embankment by the ballfield, cause I love hunting embankments, but there was nada there as well.  This place is sparse.  I then went thru some bushes and across a creek to an “out of the box section” which doesn’t really look like park property (but is), cause I do well in these situations sometimes, and it is clear this zone hasn’t been hunted much due to the trash, but it is also clear why — no deep high tones other than a lone 60s penny. (This section merits further exploration on another day, tho).

Then I decide to just meander (I don’t like doing this cause its inefficient), and I hit a very deep rosie between the tot lot and the ballfield.  Are you kidding me?  Maybe sometimes I outthink myself, cause that is generally the last area I hit cause it is always harder hit by everyone else.  But, there was a silver there.  Maybe there are more.  Who knows?  I don’t think so, but we’ll see.

That area is obviously now high on my list, but there wasn’t the time to set up a new grid to work with my old grid (I keep all the grid points in my head, and it is too much to start new sections that I can’t complete before going back to work), so I decide to go back to the old section and just add on until I have to go, and I get bupkis again.

With not enough time to complete another rank before I have to leave, I just start meandering back towards the parking lot thru the old section, and hit a beautiful deep high tone bouncy signal.  Didn’t think it was a silver cause it was a bit low (CO 42, more ore less, but some bounce into the silver range), figured it could be an exotic silver, but was most likely a wheatie or deep memorial. (This was the zone that gave up a clad quarter at 8 inches yesterday).

Turned out to be an 1822 largie on its side at 5 inches.  I knew there would be old coins in this section.  The trick is to get a silver this old.  Here’s hoping, not likely.  But, at least we got our first copper of the season.

Well, the weekend sucked.  Was actually warm enough around here to detect, but I dealt with a plumbing crisis all weekend instead.  I rarely get out on weekends, but thought I’d have the chance this time. Oh well.

But today I got out to the same site as Friday, the 50s park with sparse targets where I found a rosie and a copper flat button.  And today, I managed a another rosie and a copper flat button.

The differences were that it was warmer today, and I spent more time out there.

Any hunt with silver is good, but in all honesty, it was a frustrating hunt.  Got the silver early, and then just not even much hope.  I dug a total of just 4 coins in the 2 hours after the silver.  No one, of course, likes digging clad, but just a few more deep ones to break the monotony and give my tendinitis a rest would have been nice.

Did have one heart stopper — after the flat button, which again gives you the hope of a real oldie, cause its was mid-high tone one, I got a beautiful 8 inch deep silver quarter signal just 2 feet away.  Turned out to be a 1969 clad Q.  Are you kidding me?  Talk about dashing hopes.  And the flat button was only about three inches deep.

I don’t know about coming to this park, its only 50s, but there are reasons to believe a real oldie could be hiding here, but I feel like I’m waiting for Godot on that.  I will say that I’ve gotten one silver coin each time I’ve been here, but it feels like pulling teeth.

BTW, the button has a back mark.  Near as I can tell from some half-hearted googling, dates from the 1820-1860 range, tho I am certainly no expert on these things.

Got out today to a small park in a neighborhood that was built in the 50s.  Not my first choice, but I was in the area due to other business.  And besides, in each of the previous two trips, this park has surrendered a silver coin, so it is not a hopeless cause (this is the same site where I found a merc on 12/17 (and, no doubt, wrote a very similar entry at the time)).  My theory is that I’m not going to invest time in a new site, which may require permission, and may require return permission, both of which may be awkward, when the weather is miserable and unpredictable.

Today, however, the weather was predictable: it was miserable.  Cold and windy, and the ground was frozen.  Not the sort of rock hard frozen where you need a jackhammer, sort of the frozen like hard ice cream, where you can work a plug if you really want to, but it is a pain in the ass.

Well, I got me a rosie and a copper flat button.  Nine out of ten detectorists would prefer the flat button.  I’m the 10th.  For me, its about seeing the shiny in the hole, that experience.  Puzzle solved.  But the flat button is cool.  It even has the loop intact.  It gives you the hope of finding an old silver, cause it was a high tone target that is at least 200 years old.  Around here, pretty much everything has been farmland since the early 1700s, so you just never know.

I did succumb to the weather with an hour and a half left to hunt.  Oh well.  It wasn’t fun freezing my ass off.  If someone who takes things more seriously than myself and is willing to freeze gets the shiny, that’s life I guess.

Just a barely legal rosie yesterday, at a ballfield that gave up a couple of ’62 rosies near the end of last year.  Site dates at least to the 50s, but has been hunted hard.  Its trashy tho, and while that defends some silver, it also mucks with the TID, leading to the inefficiency of digging deep clad.  I had many deep ones that sounded like silver but were clad dimes, sounding good due to the additive effects of nearby trash.  Unfortunately, you have to dig ’em.

This site isn’t high potential, but its here for now.  Cold winter hunting is sort of throwaway in some sense, cause I don’t know if I’ll feel like going out, or how long I’ll stay out.  The cold did get to me, and I left an hour and a half early to do some errands, and get back to work.  Today looks even colder, so I don’t think I will go out.

Well, the season ended a bit early this year,  with 4 inches of snow on Saturday.  I was able to get out for a few hours on Friday, to a site that I thought could be quite good, a park behind an old office building that was a high school in the 1920s (a similar site gave me 65 silvers last year, one of my better sites), but it was totally cleaned out, filled/graded, or both.  All I found was a handful of wheats right along the road.

Anyway, 380 silvers for the year, which is down from 516 from last year, but still not bad.  14 of them were silver half dollars, which is pretty good.  3 of them were Barber halves, the oldest being a 1894S.  4 of them were reales, 2 2 reales, 1 1 reale, and 1 half reale.  I had 4 double digit silver days this year.

I did set personal record on coppers, digging 29.  My old record was 19.  All other totals were down from last years blowout year: clad, wheaties, silver blings, and so forth.  I did dig 2 gold blings, which was the same as last year.  My efficiency ratios were up tho: 6.86% of coins dug where silver, and wheaties to silvers was 2.13 (both personal records).  Maybe that is a result of using the Ultimate 13 coil, which I really like.

Well, economists love numbers and stats, but that’s enough of that I guess.  I did find four new types this year for me: liberty capped half cent, draped bust half cent, draped bust large cent, and a franklin half.  I now have 34 old coin types out of 58 (ok, I lied, one more number).

My biggest disappointment was finding only one seated coin, and no bust silver.  That stuff is hard to find, tho, at least for me.

As for goals for next year, kinda a stupid idea.  You can’t control how many sites are left, how many have been filled, graded, or hunted out.  All you can do is try to get out as much as you can to high potential sites, and attempt good research, so that what I’ll try.  The nominal goal is always 30 silvers a year, cause they are hard to find, and get harder each year.  I do know I will certainly have to do more door knocking.

So, here are some of my better finds of 2013 —

Got a new digger for Christmas, which is the same as my old digger, except that it still has all its inches.  Its amazing how these things wear down.  The one on the top is less than a year and a half old, and has lost a little over an inch in that time.

I haven’t been out in about a week due to the weather and the holidays, and doubt I will be again this year, but we’ll see.  I’d like to get one or two more hunts in to try to snag a year end silver.

Today was what we call a throwaway hunt; I had an appointment in a different town that I don’t know well, and know of only one producing site in the area (and have no time to do research), so I always hit the site when in the area.  Its very, very large, and very, very sparse, and rarely gives up the goods, but has given up 2 silver dimes.  I keep a graph paper notebook of all my in progress sites, and add a bit to the grid each time I go, and that is what I did today.

Problem was we had standing water on good parts of the site due to torrential rain last night, and where there wasn’t standing water, it was a muddy mess to dig any target.  To top it off was a hard chill wind at 40 degrees, and snow flurries.  It was miserable.  What we do for silver.

I stopped the grid a after a few ranks, cause I didn’t really feel like digging targets, and I wasn’t finding anything anyway, and freestyled about the site a bit, still finding nothing.  I hate freestyling (except when visiting a site for the first time), cause it is inefficient, and working a grid provides greater discipline — in particular, it forces you to go slow, and you need to go slow to get the deep iffy silvers.

I decided to pack it in, cause I wasn’t having fun, and had some work to do, but noticed an embankment that I’ve never worked before.  I love embankments, they often give up the goods when the surrounding site is dead — and this one did not disappoint: a 1941 merc and a couple of wheaties.

Ok, that title was pretty lame, but check this out.  Dug one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever dug yesterday (Wed), a large (13.5 gram) sterling silver fly broach.  Even used to have a stone in it at one time, but it is prolly lost in the hole somewhere.

Who would wear something like that?  Who knows?

This was at one of my better sites, a site that has given up 124 silver coins.  I never really finished it off, but all the unworked zones never seemed to have shown any promise, but I figured I’d give them one more try since I had a bigger coil and more skill.

One of those zones did give up a rosie the day before (Tue), but this was an extremely tough zone to work — it was a very steep embankment.  You wonder why anyone would have ever been on it, but you work it anyway, cause it prolly has never been worked before (especially given the number of silvers found in the hot part).  Tons of high tone trash here, it had definitely never been worked, but it only contained 3 coins.  I worked hard for that silver, cause not only was it steep, it was muddy, and I kept sliding down.

Today I had millions of Christmas errands, including buying some beer for the holidays from my favorite brewery, which put me in a town where I’ve never found one stinkin’ silver coin, despite a few old sites and many, many, attempts.  I just figured the whole town was hunted out — its possible if you live there, and work each site the way I work sites.

But I was there, and there are still some sites I’ve never tried, and I hit one of them today, and, fortunately, the entire town isn’t hunted out, as I scored two rosies and 4 wheaties in short order.  One of the rosies was affected by iron, the type you need an E-Trac with see thru turned on to see, in all honesty.  All of the wheaties were tough and in trash.  The other rosie was a slam dunk, which is nice.  Otherwise, the site seemed pretty hunted out, as there was little easy clad, but it is large, and very trashy, so there is hope for skillful working to squeeze a couple more out.  Dunno when that will happen, as its Christmas stuff and winter weather (or so they tell me), from this point on.

So, it looks like we’ll fall a bit short of 400 silvers this season, assuming I don’t get out much more, but we’ll take this season, of course.  If I don’t have anything more to post the rest of the year, I’ll at least post a recap of my season on New Year’s Eve (assuming the world hasn’t ended, since it is already 12-21-12 in parts of it).

HH and Happy Holidays!

Well, the 4 hunt slump was broken today with a ’41 merc.  Certainly not stunning silver, but we’ll take it.  Despite my almost unbelievable success over the past few years, it remains true that silver coins are still really hard to find, as the recent slump reminds me.  We’ll take it.

The site is a baseball field built in the 1950s in a small development built at the same time.  The last time I was at this site was Nov of 2010 when I pulled a dateless SLQ, and my notes said the site was dead.  And it was; the SLQ was about the only target I found, more of a circumstantial target than a systemic one. Not a site I would normally seek out aggressively, but I had a doctor’s appt in that municipality today, and the municipality in question is my second best overall (yeah, I track silver by municipality; IMHO that is by far the most important stat I track).

Whatever.  It may be a 4-5 silver site, and I got 2 of ’em now.  Doesn’t solve the “need a new site problem”.  Not sure when I’ll be back to this site or solve the “new site problem”, we’ll see.