SUCESSFUL SHALLOW WATER HUNTING
January 26, 1998 at 05:05:44THE MAN WITH THE MIDAS TOUCH BY ALAN HASSELL Copyright 1/4/1992 revised 18/1/98
The last wizard to come out of Wales to my knowledge was Merlin. But there is another one. One who has an uncanny knack of finding gold. He has found more gold in three years, than most of you would dream of owning in a lifetime. For obvious reason and security the identiity of the Wizard cannot be revealed so from here on he shall be known as either "Willy The Wizard" or the faceless hunter. Members of his metal detecting club know him simply by the name, "Goldfinger". This was the opening paragraph of the above article that was written by myself and published in Treasure Hunter Magazine in May 1992. It was this article that created a sensation and current popularity of shallow water metal detecting. Were it not for the fact, that a few other guy's were attempting to detect and write about it in water, such as John Howland, I could have claimed I pioneered the hobby in the UK as well as Australia. From here on all references about so called Wizards or Wankers will not be used. By rewriting this particular article I am in effect taking away and reclaiming the credit That an individual stole from me by taking advantage of my writings. I had come to England working om a theory that there is more gold to be found in England than in Australia, where I come from, although many readers might not have the same view. But then I find Gold as an everyday occurance, unlike many other people who spend the rest of their lives dreaming about it. During the last twelve years I had accumulated over several pounds of the precious metal and havn't even touched the tip of the iceberg yet. Every spare moment that I get, I spend prospecting. You see, there are four types of people in this world, dreamers, thinker's talker's and DOER'S. In short, this can be broken down into two types, the quick and the dead. Napoleon Hill once wrote a book called "think and grow rich," "anything the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve." I had taken some time to do my research on England's Virgin Goldfields. Oh yes, they do exisit, and plenty of them. So many in fact, that it would be impossible for one man to exploit them all during one lifetime. Hence this article in hope that some where out there, there is someone who might like to try their hand at finding Gold. I guarantee that anyone who reads this article will be able to find gold, if they apply the methods mentioned within, so read on and learn. In short one must have the determination,dedication and persistence, which are the essential ingredients of success in anything you do. So successful are my methods of finding gold, people have a tendancy to become highly jealous of ones good fortune. Other's just say, "were dead Lucky." Well,I and some of you know there's no such thing as luck. You dont get lucky if you sit in the comfort of a warm room watching telly with a can of beer in one hand and a detector in the other. Gold will not jump out of the carpet into your hands. You have to go and face the elements and use your detector. The more you use it the greater your success. Using it is one thing knowing how to use it and where to use it is a totally different matter. Before I continue I will add here that I pioneered what I call shallow water metal detecting in Australia in 1980. I was the first person to take a VLF metal detector into the water and started writing for Australian Gold Gem and Treasure Hunter Magazine in 1981 promoting shallow water detecting. Until this article appeared in the UK few people had attempted to get into the water, none knew anything about what I revealed, how to be successful at doing it and nothing at all about stainless steel scoops. What you are about to learn from here on is the Key to an Alladin's cave. Which can be compared with a bank, where at times you can go and make a withdrawal with no paper-work involved. But first one should know a little about gold and how it got to be where it is. Gold is a natural element even though it is a yellow metal. It has a specific gravity of 19.2 and in it's purest form is 24 Carats. Gold has been sought by man since before the Egyptian times. It is the one metal that cannot be corrupted. It is uneffected by any single acid but will disolve in Aqua-regis, which is a combination of 2 acids. Despite having other metals alloyed to it to make it more durable, gold can always be returned to it's natural state by retorting and cyanide. No matter how it is buried, it will always have that shiny yellow metal appearance when daylight strikes it after many years of being buried. Gold is one of the heaviest metals known to mankind, that's why it has a specific gravity of 19.2. The price of gold was originally pegged at $35.00 US per ounce since the price pegging was lifted it's value has increased. It is estimated that one day the price will sky rocket to US $1000 an ounce. It nearly reached it in the late 70s and early 80s but since then the price has kind of stabilised, although declining in 1998 owing to mines over producing causing an excess of gold to flood the market. As an international form of exchange you can change gold for money in any country in the world. Such is the demand for gold that man has killed, fought wars over it and even stolen it. One only has to look in any High Street Jewellers to realise how much some of those 1.5 gram baby bangles are. They are sold by weight although the baby ones are light gents and ladies bangles can weigh several ounces. It must be remembered that there are 31.1 grams to a troy ounce. Since early times people have adorned themselves with precious metalin one form or another. Almost everyone has worn gold as a form of fashion at one time or another. People buy gold as a hedge against inflation and for their vanity and as a form of fashion. If you have your doubts and dont beleive me look at the hands of young girls, almost every finger sports a ring of some kind or another. Just take an average woman, see what she wears on her left hand alone. She starts courting, gets an engagement ring, gets married, gets a wedding band and usually gets an eternity ring once she gives birth. Then she might wear the odd dress ring or two. Almost every woman without exception throughout the modern world wears the same. Dont tell me you had never realised it before I told you. Take a long look at the guys, they are almost as bad as the women, if not worse. The only difference is they are bigger chunkier and heavier, a fist full could be used as knuckle dusters very handy in an argument. If you have never seen this before, you are either blind or going around with your eyes shut. Why do they wear it?, well, it's popular, can be used to impress other people of what your worth and because some designs are very attractive. Hoever, because of all of the above it has also attracted the attention of an easy form of income to certain individuals, hence a spate of muggins involving heavy gold chains. Today, in 1998 several years after this article was first written we have thugs roaming the streets of London mugging tourists for expensive Rolex watches. However the above involves crime and even if you were to get your hands on this form of gold, the arm of the law is very, very long. But there is a way of obtaining some of this gold quite legally. You see there is one law that no one can beat. It's called the Law of Physics. The Laws of Physics or nature whatever you want to call it is quite simple, heat expands, cold contracts. The average person on the street wouldn't know what tempreture their own body functions best at. It's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, it is universal, everyone works best at that tempreture. As humans, we are designed to function best on dry land. Strange things happen when we put our bodies in water. For a start we cool off especially on a hot summers day, then our pores start to close up because this is the body's natural way of trying to retain body heat, it needs to survive. Body heat dissapates 24 times faster in water than it does on land. Hypothermia starts to set in, the first signs are goose bumps and shivering. Then comes shrinkage of the extremities or fingers. Now natural body oils mixed with salt water make a nice slippery substance that makes those little goodies or gold nuggets slip off the fingers to the sands below. Gold having a specific gravity of 19.2 will bury itself in sand that is granular and has an SG of 2.5. In actual fact a ring will act similar to a circular razor blade cutting it's way through the sand and is buried in seconds. Unless you have an underwater metal detector available at the time of loss chaces of recovery are highly remote. Now lets see what happens to that ring once it hits the sand. Just below the surface lies a more compacted, dense layer of black magnetic sand or magnetitie. This acts as a solid barrier on which the ring can settle. Unfortunately, owing to it's depth no VLF can penetrate it, yet alone detect it. Vlfs dont like black magnetic sands because it flattens the magnetic field put out by the coil. Much like trying to put two magnets together in opposite polarity. When the original article was written, manufacturer's knew about this but continued attempting to produce a VLF that would work in salt water overcoming these limitations. I personally modified my old Garrett Master Hunter ADS to work in salt water back in 1980-81 simply because there were no underwater metal detector's available in Australia at the time. Everyone was out chasing nuggets on the goldfields and I was finding my gold in the water. It was a race between John Crawley and myself to see who would recover the first gold ring, I won. Unfortunately the metal detector that will detect a gold ring at five feet has not been invented yet. One must use the most powerful of all detector's, the Pulse Induction metal detector. Eric Foster is probably the only man in in the UK, who not only started developement of Pulse detector's back in the 1960s but is still developing new machines using the latest technology. Eric developed the Gold Scan2 that was originally designed for finding gold nuggets on the Australian Gold Fields. Early prototypes could not handle the ironstone which is predominates the ground mineralisation there. So Eric came to Australia in order to overcome the problem and returned to the UK with about 200 pounds of the stuff gathered over a wide area. Unfortuneatley, only two or three units were imported by Miner's Den who were busy promoting their Goldseeker 15000 at the time. No one including myself had thought of using the Goldscan on the beach. Unlike VLFs Pulse machines have no tuned circuits which means more power can be applied to the search coil which attributes to it's great depth capabilities. Imagine if you can, an amplifier, microphone and speakers. If the mike is in close proximity to the speaker you;ll get feedback as you turn up the volume. The same thing applies inside the search-head of a VLF coil. Until technicians are able to overcome this problem, the laws of physics and depths will be restricted. Vlfs are also effected by salt water and black mineralised sands which is another disadvantage. Depth is lost by discriminating these effects out. However the one coil on the pulse is not affected by either salt water or black mineralised sands more power can be applied to the coil and greater depths are attainable. Which is what you want if you are to be successful in finding gold. Dealer's will tell you that Pulse machines are highly sensitive to small bits of ferrous metal, which is true. But what they dont tell you is the further you go out when the tide is out, the less ferrous metal is to be found. This is because Salt water is highly corrosive. By the time it has travelled down to the water's edge has almost rusted away. This does not mean you will not dig up iron, you will. It's fair to say, that lots of English and American detectorists that go to Australia looking for gold, come back empty handed. The reason is English detectorist love their discriminators, discriminators lose depth and also some of the metal your trying to find. Aussie's dont use discriminators on the gold fields. They dig every target because they dont want the guy behind them finding the gold they walked over. The same applies everywhere, if you want it, you have to dig it. Nothing was meant to be easy, even the finding of gold. If you dont dig it, then it wasn't meant to be yours in the first place. You get nothing for nothing in this world, you can only take out in proportion to the same amount of effort you are prepared to put in, in the first place. There's gold in them goldfields, and heres the way for you to get it. For obvious reasons, the best time to recover gold especially when it's been lost in water is either to search in the water using special underwater metal detectors or wait until the tide goes out and do your searching then. English beaches can have as much as a 30 foot tidal range. Which is about the same a some ocean beaches in Australia. However, where I live, we only have a two meter tidal range, which means you must get in the water. In certain area's in the UK a low tide can mean about a mile of sand is exposed till you get to the waters edge from the high tide mark. Four tides occur in any 24 hour period. Two Highs, Two Lows. They are seperated by 6 hourly intervals. Or 6 hours after a high tide, one can be safe to assume it will be followed by a low tide. The safest time to work is 2 hours before low water and two hours after. Four hours swinging a search-head and digging up potential targets could give even the hardiest detectorist plenty of exercise. Tidal movement is governed by phases of the moon and its gravitational pull. Lowest tides are referred to as spring tides which occur at full moon and the lowest water levels several days later. During the course of a normal day one can expect to get about 8 hours detecting in. The more you detect, the more you are likely to find. If you are going to go in the water, you will need some form of protection by way of a wet suit, semi dry suit or a dry suit to retain your body heat. Those same laws of physics that effect everyone, will affect you too, you are only mortal, your not invincible either. So you need to protect your body from the cold water. You will also need gloves and boots, there will be plenty of broken glass, sharp pieces of metal and other trash you will encounter whilst in the water. Next you need something to recover your finds with, so you'll have to make some kind of scoop. A shovels no good your finds will simply fall back into the water if your lucky enough to even get a few grains of sand to the suface. Once you have a scoop, you need some kind of floating seive, in order to seperate the sand from the goodies. One can work faster using a seive than just a scoop because you can look for other targets whilst the sand is draining away from your first taget. Time is your worst enemy, you have to make the most of it once you get out there. Failure to dig a target could mean someone else will get it before you. You will also need a divers weight belt with a few weights on. Once you get into deep water, you'll find you will bob around like a cork and be unable to get leverage on your scoop to make it penetrate into the sand below. You should have two pouches on your belt or goodie bags, one for junk the other for the good finds. It pays to remove the junk you dig up because you wont have to dig it again next time in the water. Apart from which, you'll be doing everyone a big favour by cleaning up the beach at the same time. Officials could take a very dim view of anyone leaving rubbish behind that could endanger the health and safety of other people. That weight belt is also handy for attaching a nylon cord to your floating seive, it sits beside you in the water and wont float away. Since this article was written several underwater detectors have come onto the market, I will not name them all but be careful about your choice. Remember they are going to be used submerged underwater. Therefore the first consideration must be their vulnerabilty to leakage. This is governed by the number of seals on the unit. The more seals a unit has the greater the risk of failure and leakage. Salt Water is highly corrosive and can ruin expensive circuitry so buy well known units that have a record of reliability. It's your hard earned money at the end of the day. One Unit has no less than 14 seals each one vulnerable to leakage. There are four detector's for use underwater I will name, I personally use a Whites PI 3000 and Fisher Impulse, the other that are well proven is the CZ20 and White Surfmaster. I had major arguements with an Australian manufacturer about the reliability of their product and refuse to discuss the matter. Remember it's your choice, your money. Right, having got all the gear, your ready to enter the water. When you do, look out for near shore and long shore channels. This is a good place to find because currents running along them remove tons of sand bring gold rings within reach of the detector. Once you have a target, simply dig it up using your scoop place it into your seive and check your hole to ensure the targets been removed, if it hasn't you'll just have to keep digging till it's out of the hole and you dont get anymore signals. Rings being what they are sometimes have a tendancy to fall out of the scoop and although it's not in the hole it could be quite near you, this happens occasionally. One thing though once you see that first glint of gold, you'll will experience a feeling of exhileration, you get this same feeling every time you see it although after a time you are able to control your emotions and continue to work just like it was another old coin. What if you dont want to get into the water? No problems, just use one of the better known brands of Pulse Induction machines. When I wrote this article it was written about the Goldscan, because I had gone to Cornwall in the UK to write a test report about it. Trouble was I was given an instruction manual and page two was missing. Thats where I met a guy who I made quite famous and now for personal reasons regret meeting him. He was using the same machine. I introduced myself, he told me what I wanted to know and set about the task of finding some gold. You dont find it by standing in the same spot watching other poeple detecting. You grid an area of say 20 feet by 20 feet and if you dont find anything there move along the beach stretching out that area even further. It's a law of averages that eventually you will hit a spot that becomes productive. However there are some signs you can look for that will indicate productive area's, such as hollows,pools of water and black sands. You might laugh and my next suggestion, that is to tie your shoelaces together before you start searching. Doing so will slow you down to a certain extent but you will make a thorough search. All too many people make a mad dash for the beach swinging search-coils madly a foot above the surface of the sand in an endeavour of finding that glory hole. Forget about it, if you really want to find gold slow down be precise and methodical about your search methods, you'll find it more rewarding in the long run. Remember the old saying, "by the inch it's a cinch, by the yard, it's bloody hard." Just place one foot 6 inches in front of the other at a time for two sweeps back and forth then make your next 6 inch move. If you dont you'll go over targets and miss them. Fairy steps are the order of the day when it comes to gridding. Drag your scoop behing you so that it leaves a trail in the sand.that way you can sometimes see, where you have been and follow a stright line or course. the same applies when your searching in water. The only other item you'll need on the beach is a good sturdy spade or shovel. The ideal area is where the sand is fine grained and tightly packed. Large loose sand is not very good because the gold just sinks to the bottom which might be 15 feet from the surface. When you dig a hole make sure the target is out. If not you'll just have to persist until it is removed from the hole. Dont be suprised if you dig holes over two feet even three foot deep. Ive done it many a time but the rewards have been worth it. I admit, I have dug holes upto 3 foot deep just to pull out an old can, you have to go through the rubbish to get to the good stuff. It all sounds like hard work, and it is, but then again, work never killed anyone. If it's too hot in the kitchen you should'nt be there in the first place, so get out before you even start. This game isn't meant to be easy, you have to work at it to be successful. Because of the ultra sensitivity and depth many people consider pin-pointing to be difficult. (we get whingers everywhere) Instead of working out for themselves rely upon other people to tell them what is usually available in their instruction books, if only they spent the time to sit down and study. Pin-pointing with any detector is basically the same no matter what detector your using. If your having trouble lift the coil and move it to the strongest part of the signal drop your coil over the highest sound and it should be dead centre of the coil. Slide your foot behind the coil, remove the coil and your almost in the right area. Dont expect precision, your detector gave you an indication, you either want to dig the target or your lazy and dont want to, that's why your having a whinge. Pull tabs are your worst enemy, your going to find them everywhere Some states in the USA banned the dammed things. It's a pity the inventor cant be made to put some of his royalties into cleaning beaches of the dammed things. They are a danger and a threat to the health and safety of every bather, their sharp edges can cut feet. Some people reckon they can tell the difference between the sound a ring pull gives and the sound of a ring. I cant and Im honest about it, I dig every good sounding signal, and so should you. Now that I have told you about the basics. Lets get down to the nitty gritty of it all and how it came to be there and how much of it is waiting to be found. Anyone with a simple calculator can work out rough estimates of what they might find on a given beach. For a start we have a few statistics we can work on. We know that there are 5 months of the year people are going to get into the water. May, June, July, August and September. Each month for ease of calculation has 30 days which if multiplied by the months, gives us 150 days per year that people are going to get wet. Now that doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that swimming became popular at the turn of the century we have 100 years which gives us a massive 15,000 days of swimming. Every year thousands of people flock to the coastal resorts for holidays and recreation. At the first sight of water, they want to get into it. So there's a big mad rush to jump into their bather, grab a towel and rush off to the beach. As soon as they arrive they make a great dash for the cool soothing waters. But wait about a bit, havn't they forgotten something?. Of curse they have, in that great rush and panic to be the first one in the water, they forgot to take their jewellery off. Too late now, they are in the water and the Laws of Physics are begining to work. They begin to lose body heat, they start shivering, fingers shrink, that action of throwing that ball from one person to another was sufficient kinetic energy to make a ring fly off the finger only to be lost in the sands. Wait about a minute and they gather around an area, are they looking at fish on the bottom? Of course not they're trying to recover the ring that has now buried itself in the sand. Although that's only one example most of the rings literally fall from the fingers without the owner realising it until it's too late. It's the Old Laws of Physics trick and it happens to hundreds of people every day, but not all loses are made like this. Chains are only as strong as their weakest link and they break very easily if a boisterous guy grabs hold of a good looking chick in the water. Coins are lost in their millions, dont you remember the pockets they put into bathers in the 50s and 60s. Manufacturers didn't think about gravity when they designed these so called practical gaments. Now let's get back to that calculator. Being highly conservative let's assume that only one 3 gram wedding band was lost during a day on a beach. Three grams is about the lightest wedding band your going to find, if it gets any lighter your missus probably nicknamed you SCROOGE. So 3 grams multiplied by the 15,000 days equals 45,000 grams. If we convert to ounces by dividing by 31.1 we come up with 1446 ounces. Divide that by 14, because there are only 14 ounces to a troy pound and we come up with 103 pounds thats nearly one hundredweight or 1 twentyth of a ton. See what |'m getting at, with only one lousy 3 gram gold ring. How about the others that were in the water, your not going to tell me that only one person became affected by the Laws of Physics are you. Of course not, no one really knows but I know that at least 20 other people would have suffered the same fate. Now that hundredweight has finally become the magic ton. What about the precious stones jewellers use in those nice little trinkets. Forgot to mention that didn't I? Diamonds, Saphires, Emeralds, rubies, pearls, opal are but a few of the precious stones used by jewellers to adorn their masterpieces of craft- manship. These can be worth more than the value of the gold. Now and only now, you can see that I wasn't kidding and fooling around when I stated that I would give you a key to unlock Alladin's cave. I hope you realise and noticed that I only used a single 3 gram ring for this highly conservative estimation. I did not mention anything about the other larger rings that are out there waiting to be found. The heavy Class rings, knuckle dusters and ornate chunks of expensive rubbish people like to decorate their fingers with. Whats more, this is the only form of gold that I know of that gets replenished year after year after year. A gold mine will eventually run out and cease to operate. Unless you went in there with one of the old gold dredges used on the goldfields no single individual is ever going to clear a beach of it's goodies. Not myself, and most certainly not you, even if you worked at it 24 hours a day for the rest of your life. For the simple reason, the sea bed is in a constant state of flux. Unlike a lake which is non tidal, it is the tides that mix the goodies with the sand into a giant xmas pudding. In rough weather those goodies can and do move sometimes over quite large distances. For this reason you will never find the beach to be exactly the same as it was the previous day. It varies, sometimes there is too much sand around to even get a signal yet alone find a ring. You have your good days and you have your bad days. More often than not you'll have more bad days than you will the good ones. I just dont want you to as a reader to visualise all this gold out there and you are going to clean up before anyone else. It simply may not happen for you. But it has for many people including myself. One Day I searched a beach in Cornwall, I found 3 gold rings, as I was leaving the beach I told this guy I met to continue searching where I had left off. Afew days later, I met him again in Newquay, he told me he had found another 3 rings in the same area. This individual had no less than 6 troy pounds of gold at the time as was presumed to be the ants pants. But without my help on that particular day I doubt if that guy would have found anything. Which is nothing to be ashamed of some days it like that. I write under my own name, I do not hide behind silly names, I take full responsiblity of the accuracy of what I write. You dont do that unless you have got your facts 100% right about everything. I will not write about anything unless whatever method is used has been tried and tested by myself. If you are writing a Test Report your own opinions might be biased and can be disproved. Should this happen your credibility goes down the tubes and your finished. Always take someone else along with you for a second opinion, they notice things that you may have overlooked and you can be objective if a certain point is raised. If your going to stick you neck on the chopping block make sure you have the undisputable facts, tell the good with the bad. Remember one thing, it is you members of the buying public that keep this hobby and many businesses going. However there are some unscupulous manufacturer's who will baffle you with bulldust just to make a sale. Dont be in such a rush to get into the water, take your time, look around find out whats available in the marketplace. Count the number of seals, count the controls, each one needs a seal, cables etc, remember the less seals on a machine the less trouble your likely to have with it. Now I leave it to the new guys to get out there and give it your best shot. It's still out there waiting for someone like you to find it. I hope that anyone reading this article will find it informative and
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