Couple of questions about beach detecting at the ocean

[old_mikee]

Hi All

I am fairly new to metal detecting and have a few questions related to detecting at the Ocean beach.

First off, I have a Whites MXT and I am not sure what coil would work best on beach. My two choices are: the stock round Eclipse 950, or the 6 x 9 oval Eclipse DD? With that question asked, are there more rewarding finds found in the wet sand or in the dry sand? Also, do I search in the Ground mode or in Salt mode on the dry sand.

We are going again on Sunday and I would like to try searching in the wet sand. I tried last week, searching on the salt setting, but I could not really get the detector to sound right, so I abandoned the effort until I can resolve the setting issues. I am hoping for some good advice from this forum..

Thanks in advance for your reply,

mikee

 

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[Dixie Digger]

i think its the nature of the detector.i think you will find it is very unstable in wet salt sand. but will do fine in the dry sand.

 

[nudels]

Y'know, when a detector says it has a "salt" setting, well by golly, it better work just fine in the salt, and not in a half-rear-end way.

 

[Treasure_Hunter]

My jewelry finds are at least 95% in the wetsand/ water vs dry sand.

If you can't get in the water which is by far the best location, then you want to try to concentrate hunting the towel and chair lines. If you study the beach you see there are usually several lines where bathers concentrate and they usually run in a line.

At the height of the hide tide line is usually a blanket line, you have a another towel/blanket line usually lower up on the wet sand, another line closer to the water that is usually chairs and umbrellas where the surf is lapping closer to it. You have another line where most of the "play (frisbee ect ) is going on and the waters edge where mothers play with the little ones.

If your ever at the beach and a sudden rain storm comes up, if there is no lighting, hunt those lines. People rush to get out of the rain and pick up their belongings quickly usually losing something as they do this....

Good luck and good hunting.......

 

[Sandman]

Treasure Hunter is right and you must study the way people use your beach. Most of the good stuff comes from the wet sand and in the water where slippery fingers lose rings. The land detectors even with a salt mode can have trouble in the wet sand due to varying amounts of black sand. Reducing the sens might help some.

IMO the king of the beach is the Sov GT with a WOT coil or a Excal due to the better disc features of Iron Mask. If you always have the strength to dig it all, go with a PI.

To learn more, go here: http://thegoldenolde.com/

Good Luck,
Sandman

 

[old_mikee]

Thanks for all the replies. We are on our way this morning to give it another try, this time with the DD in the wet sand.

Cheers,

mikee

 

[spritch]

I just got back from Vero where I used an Explorer most of the time but also used an MXT with a hot head coil. As others have stated, the MXT was fine on dry sand but when I got to wet sand, even in the salt mode, it made lots of extraneous noise. Enough that I dug phantom signals and I'm sure I missed soft signals. And don't even think about wading- it goes nuts. Sticking with the Explorer for me.
Spritch

 

[old_mikee]

Well, here are our results from a 3 hour hunt at Zuma beach this morning. The first picture is what I found and the second is what my wife found using her inexpensive American Hawks machine. (she also found a couple of other bottle caps and lots of tin foil. With the American Hawk, you have to dig every target)

I was using the MXT with the DD coil and set to Salt as suggested. It did ground balance much better than the stock coil but I never heard a target, or I simply mistook all targets as background noise when searching in the water, or the wet sand. I am sure I was doing something wrong, but I have no idea what. Anyway, what you see in both pictures was found in the dry sand. The MXT set back to Ground.

The best part was that it was a beautiful day at the coast. We saw a pod of dolphins fishing 100 yards off shore, and the water was not cold, but nice. Hope everyone else had a wonderful day as well...

thanks again for the replies,

mikee

 

[Maui Mike]

WTG Mike,, sounds like a fine day you had!

 

[Ammietuar]

I'm really new to salt beach hunting, but with my MXT I found that if you drop the sensitivity to just above 7, and increase the descrim to 4, the switch on salt, with the stock 9.5 coil, you'll still get alot of false signals, but it is way more manageable that running it on presets. I only dug the strong and repeatable hits within the first 6 inches. Any thing deeper than that normally was a soda can or chunk of pipe. I'm also in Korea, so the coins rang in a bit different, but I was still able to find a small copper ring at 6 inches in the wet sand. As for the water, I ran it over a couple shallow pools and it went crazy, so I didn't really get into that since the wet sand was being good to me.