I want to learn more about reading a beach

[Golden oaks]

What is your best advice for where to look to learn more about reading a beach and tides, etc. I want to know the science behind sand movement & best places to search the coastline & why. We don't seem to have much of a hard pan bottom here on the NC coastline ...but then I've never been here during the late winter searching the beaches.

Thank you!

 

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[ChampFerguson/TN]

ChampFerguson/TN where in TN are you? I am a South Florida beach hunter, but I am living in Sweetwater, TN most of the time temporarily because my father is sick.

PM sent.

 

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[trdking]

 

[Terry Soloman]

You two make a LOVELY couple!

 

[trdking]

You two make a LOVELY couple!

Does anyone know who these guys are? Are they members?

 

[Golden oaks]

Another good one for the basics http://www.mdhtalk.org/tutorials/beaches/metal-detecting-beaches.pdf

This was helpful and easy to understand! Thank you.

 

[CharlesUpstateNY]

Lets split this into 2 seasons since I use a different strategy for each...mostly I learned this from the NJ Legend.

Summer (late spring, summer, early fall) before the storms begin.

1. The ocean piles sand onto the beach burying everything typically under feet of sand, that slower curling wave action picks up sand and heaves it up onto the beach. So you are looking for fresh drops things people lost in the last week or two before it is also buried so deep its not reachable.

2. If your beach has lifeguard stands and swimmers are restricted to swimming within the cones concentrate your hunts there in the summer. Just a higher concentration of targets.

3. I hunt low tides, specifically the wet sand. Hunting around peoples beach blankets up in the dry sand, people view that as creepy like you are trying to steal their stuff so I avoid in the summer. Plus the dry sand is full of trash, more on that below.

4. Jewelry, trash, coins will be all mixed together just the nature of the beast in the summer. Personally I skip digging zinc cents and dimes, I concentrate on quarters, silver, and potential gold signals. I may give up the rare heavy class ring that ID's in the zinc cent zone, but after wasting time digging hundreds of zinc cents and never a heavy class ring I'm fine with that.

5. If you are in some pushed up sand and its mostly lightweight targets and trash mentally switch to small jewelry hunting, you can make some finds in those. If there are no targets obviously move on.

Winter (mid to late fall, winter, early to mid spring) when storms are active

1. Wave action is typically the opposite of summer, the ocean begins stripping sand off the beaches and dragging it back out into the water uncovering the layers of stuff that's been lost over the summer. The more storms the more beach erosion the more layers are uncovered. Larger storms an uncover years, even decades of targets. In this season the ocean works for you doing a lot of the work.

2. Look up and down the shore line, does it look straight or do you see crescent shaped scallops extending from the waters edge back up towards the dry sand? Make haste to the eroded scalloped areas. Typically what's happening there is, there's a 2nd sand bar just off shore in the water. When waves hit that sand bar it sucks energy out of the waves. Where there is a break in that outer sand bar the waves are free to storm right up the beach with their full energy and erode the beach more. Typically if you find a scallop you will find a break in the sand bar in front of it. These may last for a day or two, or even a couple weeks. The break in the bar can migrate up/down the shore moving the scallop with it.

3. Sometimes the breaks in the sandbar and scallop is less obvious, if you are hunting along the waters edge and are finding quarters, fishing sinkers, heavy targets near the waters edge look for a deep hole in the water. The waves can dig a deep hole then incredibly toss even fairly large lead fishing sinkers up onto the sand, these can be gold ring mines and last for a day or several days. You can hunt it clean then come back at the next low tide and its loaded with targets again.

4. Look for cliffs in the sand due to erosion. Typically storms hitting the beach at an angle. The cliff may be only a few inches, a couple feet, or in extreme cases I have seen cliffs on the NJ shore that were 8 to 10 feet tall. Hunting the bottom of these cliff areas are good digging.

5. Did you mark the lifeguard stands on a GPS in the summer so you could hunt them again in the winter?

6. The ocean will sort targets out for you by weight during the storm season. When you first arrive at the beach zig zag between the low and high tide line, sometimes the heavy targets where gold will be found will be near the low tide line with lines of lighter weight targets higher up the beach, both lines running parallel to the water. Other times it can get flipped flopped where the heavy targets are up high and the lighter ones down load, hence sampling with a zig zag pattern.

7. If you find a concentrated patch of targets via zig zagging slow down and begin gridding. I typically drag my scoop behind me so I can see where I have scanned already.

8. If your detector has a wide scan mode and targets are spread out switch to this mode. Its surprisingly easy to miss a ring with your coil, typically at the end of your swing left or right, in wide scan mode the detector will pick up a target off the outside edge of your coil, its like swinging a bigger coil. Why yes my hunting buddy who was using wide scan mode did walk into the middle of a patch I gridded and dug a big fat platinum wedding band I missed

9. Even in this season I leave the dry sand to the dry sand hunters and stick to the wet sand, just my personal preference. The ocean in this season will wash a lot of the light weight trash out to see doing some of the work for me. I also skip zinc cents and clad dimes, concentrating on potential gold and silver targets.