4 hours at the campground / lake = 3 rings and some medals

[time4me]

So yesterday was my day to go detecting after dropping the kids off at school. I made the long drive out to the old park / campground that I've been hunting these past few months, since every time I hunt this park I come home with at least a couple of really cool items. I had talked to one of the park rangers earlier in the week and he mentioned to me that the lake there had been drained down quite low revealing quite a bit of the smelly, mucky lake bottom. With this info in hand, I hit the local sporting goods store on Wednesday and bought a pair of waders with attached boots, since I knew the lake bottom was going to be very messy.

Well, I was right - the exposed lake bottom was hideous, but yielded some neat finds. The treasure did not come easy though, as it was guarded by a couple of pirates...

And if that wasn't enough, I had to get past an alien as well...

Once I defeated the pirates and alien, the treasure started coming. Here are the two silver rings I found in the muck...

It took a bit of electrolysis to clean them up, but now they look really nice...

Also found in the hideous muck of the lake bottom were these three swimming medals marked on the back with the initials of a local swim team and dated 1984...

Additional scoops of muck produced this little first aid cross item, and a pinewood derby medal that a cubscout must have won, only to lose it in the lake...

And I was really pleased to find two more of these mysterious dollar-sized gold aluminum medals. If anyone out there can identify the significance of the commemorative date 1837 and the fur-trader looking dude on the front, PLEASE let me know...

Here is the coinage that was pulled from the gross and smelly muck - includes one 1952 wheatie...

Well after about 2 hours of back-breaking muck scooping I was dead tired and wanted to get out of the mud pool I had created by walking around and scooping. Thank god I found this "swamp rocket" to get me out of there...

With a couple of hours left to hunt, I hit the turf in the park and turned up this sweet little Navajo style sterling ring made by the same company as the larger Navajo style ring I found at this site a couple of weeks ago - Bell Trading Post Company...

Here are the three rings together...

And here is the total haul for the 4 hours, including most of the trash. The giant tokens were pulled from the lake bottom - I assume that they were tossed in for kids to dive for. Probably the same way the gold aluminum tokens wound up in the lake.

Keepers for the day...

If I go back to hunt the lake again, I'll take a shovel instead of my Nuttall scoop - the muck kept getting packed into the scoop and wouldn't come out.

Thanks for looking! Get out there and have a great and productive detecting experience!!!!

Jim

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Upgraded Night Vision Monocular Digital Infrared Monocular Telescope for 100% Darkness with 8X Zoom - Grab it through Amazon!

[Merf]

Congrats on all those sweet finds

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[DANGLANGLEY]

Very nice finds. I like those rings. I know how bad it is to hunt in muck. They had drained a small lake to repair the dam and I wanted to hunt the swimming area where a raft was sitting in the mud so I waded through waist deep mud where an old creek bed was that fed the lake and got my feet together because I stepped on an old bottle and it made my foot slide over next to my other one. It was like a vaccum. I had to lay on my back to be able to pull my feet apart. Once I got across the old creek channel the muck was only knee deep. Old swimming areas are a great place to hunt. We had the hunt of our life. My buddy got some kind of parasite in his bloodstream and got pretty sick from it. It's a lot of fun and it stinks something awful.

DANGLANGLEY

 

[River Rat]

Great finds Love those pirate ducks

RR