8hr water hunt... good and bad

[flgliderpilot]

8hr water hunt... mixed results

After a 4 hour wet sand hunt last night I was feeling excited about the 800.. it was just doing great in the wet sand.

So today I spent about 8 hours water hunting knee to neck, salt water Florida beach.

Things started out great. I was getting targets fairly deep, was impressed. Then I started digging tiny little bits of foil.. like 4mm square bits of foil coming in from 5 to 8. Ok that is not so great. Platinum rings also come in down in this range. Annoyed, I continued on thinking that hopefully a platinum ring would be loud compared to the foil.

Found pull tabs which are 14 on the dry sand were consistently 12-13 in the water. I dug a lot of pull tabs thinking they were gold rings. Not really surprised that's pretty normal.

Then I get a very loud 12. Excellent! I take a scoop, and target is gone. Excellent, check scoop. No target. OKAY.. I dig another scoop... no target.. no signal. Again.. and Again... and Again. I never found it, never got another signal. I tried pinpoint and it just went nuts. It was giving no tone in the hole, and a tone everywhere BUT the hole. WHAAAT. I played with pinpoint for awhile and never really got it to work right. I decided it was just a pull tab that floated away.

Frustrated, I moved on... good solid 19-20-21. Ok I know it's a penny, but I'll dig it anyway just to see how deep it is. One scoop. It's gone. Not in the scoop not in the hole. I search around, nothing. I take more scoops. Nothing. I was determined and spent 10 minutes trying to find it. Nothing. Pennies don't float away : | Tried pinpoint again very crazy results, occasionally seemed to be almost working and then would go nuts again.

Moving on frustrated... another penny... OK I dig. EXACT REPEAT. No penny, no signal. W T F. Nothing lighter than a penny is coming in at 20-21. Hmmm.

I did this no lie at least 5 more times.

Then I got a very very faint target, bouncy... between 12 and 15, but broken...faint iron signature. I would have missed it if I wan't chatting up some SUPER HOT woman in a bikini. We chat, she wishes be good luck and still watching her wishing I was 30 again I decide I'll "pretend" to work this crappy signal which I know for a fact is a bottle cap. I take one stupid SHALLOW scoop and it's a huge tungsten band. Seriously? I'd have passed on this if I wasn't being hyper sensitive in testing this machine. This thing would have blown my ears off with my CZ-21. I'm tempted to thank her for the good luck even though it's just tungsten, but I'm getting a little irritated with my machine. To be fair I had just dunked my waterproof headphones and they were not as loud so it's possible it really WAS loud but just didn't sound loud. I dunno.

Then I started noticing a weird solid false at 1 or 2 occasionally. Very strong, not like a typical false. Trying to figure out where it was coming from, I rotate the handle clockwise and counter clockwise. Boom, there it is every time. Every single time you rotate the machine in the water, say between 11:00 and 1:00, it gives a strong tone at 1 or 2. Notched out 1 and 2. Moving on....

I got hit by a stingray in the top of the foot. Ok, time to call it a day! Limped back to my car bleeding. Will recharge and head out later!

After about 8 hours I can say I was not really disappointed, but hoping for better at times. VDI was nice to have, it was very useful in the water.

One thing is for sure, this machine does not do well with targets on edge. When digging targets in the salt water, they get disturbed, flipped, and possibly upright. This seems to make them completely invisible to this machine. I found if I waited around for awhile, they would eventually settle horizontal again, and I could start to hear them again... but scoop and miss, and it's gone again.

Need to try this with a ring to make sure it does not do the same.

I'm planning to take the machine back to the beach with my CZ-21.. going to bury some coins on edge in the wet sand and see what happens with depth of each machine. At this point I am not ready to blame the machine since weird things happen all the time water hunting. I have lost many targets with my CZ as well, so it could have just been a bunch of light floater targets. I can't say for sure that I wouldn't have lost them with the CZ also.

Battery life was pretty good.... I hunted dry sand for 4 hours last night (with low backlight), and water for 8 hours today, and still had half a charge.


more later.

 

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[dirtlooter]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

[ARC]

Good descriptive post.

 

[flgliderpilot]

all honesty here I paid for my equinox out of my pocket

 

[Professor of Engineering]

Thank you for the nice in field (water) information!

 

[Terry Soloman]

Solid post! I'm hoping to get in the water here in New York, next month. Till then I'm in the water only to my knees, and my experience with the 600 has been excellent so far in shallow water and wet sand. Please let us know what you discover when you take out the CZ!

 

[flgliderpilot]

Will do. not trying to bash the 800 I think it's a great machine for dry sand and wet sand. Just trying to determine how it performs in the water.. no bias here. If it sucks I'll say it, if it's great, I'll say it!

 

[smokeythecat]

mmmmmmmmmmm....don't know.

 

[dirtlooter]

I have limited water detecting and of course it was in fresh water. however, in the few times that I have gone, found out real quickly about chasing signals that moved easily. Of course it was foil and tabs and such. I was actually using an Ace 250 that I had made a waterproof box for the unit. I had to open it to turn in on and off etc. but it worked for what I was trying to do. I found my 1st class ring with it. I got the AT GOLD and tried it at several river spots but never found anything worth talking about. by then the AT was getting a little heavy for me so I quit going. The Nox should fill the bill a lot better although I would have to "share" it with the wife. I have already readied the AT GOLD to be sold so when and if it does sell, I will have to decide between the 600 and the 800. So for me, all of these threads are full of info. Part of me is hoping that they would come out with the smaller coil by then too.

 

[vferrari]

Great report. Jury is still out I'd say until a bunch of Equinox folks get as wet as Flgliderpilot. In reality, the folks getting in it up to their necks, like Pilot, are hard core beach hunters who are typically using the CZ's, Excals, ATX's, CTX's and Sand Sharks. In other words we are talking dedicated beach machines and/or $1000++ hardware and expert detectorists. So I'm impressed Pilot stuck with it despite the frustrations. That tells me Equinox can at least hang with the big beach boys if not outplay them. If anything, Flgliderpilot painted an awesome portrait of just how difficult hard core surf hunting really is regardless of what you are swinging.

 

[smokeythecat]

I wish I could water hunt. Little legs won't do it for me anymore. That slope at the beaches here is pretty steep. It's going to be a fun summer though. Everyone with the Equinoxes will be in the water and I'll have the nice flat dry areas all to myself.

 

[Silver Saver]

Mmmmmmmm a hot woman on the beach! Hope your foot isn't too bad and heals up well

 

[GroundBalanced]

FLGliderpilot.... that's a very nice post. So, i've run into the situation where i'm digging a target in the West Coast FL Beach, and it just disappears from the scoop & hole, then back again, but near the hole, and after a couple of times (and some luck) i find out it's a splitshot weight or some other tiny piece of something that's just falling thru my TREX scoop. I've also noticed on wireless headphones that if the signal blows your ears out (nice tidy strong signal), you can lose the audio from the headphones for a couple of seconds almost like they were overwhelmed and had to recover. I've certainly had the float-away situation, but once you disturb that sand, the undertow of an object can move it just a couple of feet and it will no longer be in the target area. So i have to give mother nature her dues. But reality is... there is really just 1 way to feel confident that your machine is working properly and as expected - and that is to compare it to another Equinox on the same targets. If you want to hit the water sometime together, we can put the machines thru the same targets we locate and see if they react the same. Just let me know. I have the 600 but in the saltwater it will work the same as the 800. ...PM me if you want.

 

[doubloon hunter]

I fail to recover at least 6 targets per 2 hour session that dont go away, but cant find them... Beach hunting and cannot pick them out of sand they are so small...A 1/4" square of foil I have dug 8" for.... Wish I could null out tiny targets.....

 

[flgliderpilot]

I fail to recover at least 6 targets per 2 hour session that dont go away, but cant find them... Beach hunting and cannot pick them out of sand they are so small...A 1/4" square of foil I have dug 8" for.... Wish I could null out tiny targets.....

Yeah best thing to do is avoid those low number targets in the water... 6 or 8 is likely foil.. but it could also be a broken ring or earring, so you just never know. What are the chances of it being a good target, and of those possible targets, what is the chance that it will be worth more than $40?

But, we buy these expensive machines so we can know what the ODDS are of the target being something good. When the odds are low, and you have a limited amount of time, it's best to move on to a target with better odds. Higher possibility of winning means more wins overall.