Back in the Game - 2014

[Dave Rishar]

Today was the year's first hunt, my first time back in the saddle in some years, and the girlfriend's first time out. I'm happy to report that the bug has bit me again, and she's hooked as well. I'm unhappy to report that the day wasn't too productive. The hunt was on private property in Bremerton, around a house from the early thirties. The previous owner had lived there from when it was built until two years ago and was known to be a fastidious man, so I wasn't expecting much trash. I was wrong on that. I'm pretty sure that there were more nails in the ground than there were in the house.

The finds today, not counting nails and random pieces of metal:

- Two whiskey rocks belonging to the current owner that had been thrown outside by his toddler. (He did not want them back, and thanked me for removing them as he'd hit them occasionally with his lawnmower.)
- $0.14, including a few copper pennies. I was a bit surprised that there weren't more coins.
- One spent .45 ACP bullet with rifling marks on it. Due to the shallow depth and horizontal orientation, it's my opinion that this floated in from some other part of the neighborhood and was not discharged into the ground from nearby. Bremerton, right? I offered it to the owner as a keepsake but he didn't want it. We got a good story out of it regardless.
- What appears to be a utility tag, labelled "BREM B L". Appears similar to the ones on utility poles.
- A large socket for a ratchet.

We also discovered a stub of a pole that was buried far too deeply to easily remove, and I accomplished my secondary mission of locating the electrical conduit running from his house to the garage. We left that hole open at his request. The previous owner had apparently made a "step" immediately in front of the garage that consisted of a car wheel or hub of some sort that was filled with concrete; due to the rust leeching into the surrounding soil, it created a pretty big hit. This caused a bit of momentary excitement until I dug it out. I replaced it but left it uncovered per the owner's request.

This was primarily a training mission, first and foremost. I wanted the girlfriend to get familiar with working a detector in a field setting and to see if she even liked it, and I wanted to get used to my new Pro Pointer and find out if my new western Washington ensemble was up to the task. She did, I did, and it totally was. We spent most of the afternoon in a downpour and with the exception of my head and hands, I was completely dry. I now have something to wear for the off-season.

We realized at the end of the day that even though this was a worst case scenario (horrible weather, no good scores, and lots of careful hole-filling), this is something that we'd enjoy doing once per week or so. In recognition of this, Saturday is now hunt day and we've gone in halfsies on a better machine. My old umax will stick around as a backup machine, and because I've found some cool things with it in the past and am just plain reluctant to get rid of it. (After an afternoon in this storm, it also looks quite a bit better than it used to. I really ought to clean it more often.)

Next Saturday will either be a repeat at the last site as another training mission, or else a jaunt to one of the local parks. I've got some leads, but I suspect that one or two of the parks will be productive in the meantime for various reasons.

BTW, if anyone here was on the fence about getting a pinpointer, just go and do it. Not having one of these was probably what caused me to lose interest the last time. The convenience and usefulness of these things aren't apparent until you use one. The Garrett is not advertised as being waterproof, but it was still working while I was shaking mud out of the speaker holes, and one can do some light digging with it. It was expensive, but I was convinced that it was money well spent on the very first hole.

 

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[Dave Rishar]

Spent about 20 minutes trying out the new machine on the front lawn. I didn't do it for long, as it was after midnight and I wanted to be back inside before the police were called or I was mugged. I found one clad quarter, so I'm already doing better than I did last Saturday.

I'll try to get another quick practice session in before work tomorrow afternoon, and then it's off to a certain park on Saturday. Yeah, it was probably hunted out when I was a kid, but this one's a special case. Maybe there will be something. I won't know for sure until I check, will I?

 

[Dave Rishar]

Spent a half hour before work today after tweaking the settings a bit. I found a few pieces of foil, a giant pile of sheet metal and roofing tiles (don't ask, but I suspect that the previous owner slumlord was responsible for this when he screwed up the roof), one clad dime, one nickel, three zincolns, one copper, and a steel Canadian cent - that last one surprised me, and reassured me that Minelab's coin setting would actually allow me to find a ferrous coin while skipping over nails and bottlecaps. I also found my first ring. We haven't figured out yet whether it's stainless or silver, but I wouldn't have cared if it was plastic. First is first. I covered maybe 10% of my tiny city lot, so there's plenty (relatively) more to do when I'm bored.

So, a few things:

1. I'm happy with my Etrac. This is fun again, and that sucker goes DEEP.
2. Unlike my old Tesoro, the discrimination really works on this machine. I'm hearing more silence than threshold buzz on the factory coin setting. My Tesoro would still be pinging above foil in this sort of ground.
3. My front yard has been the most productive area that I've worked in some time. I'll keep hitting it when nothing else is going on.
4. I have to hit some of my old hunting spots again. Did I mention that I'm happy with the Etrac?

I chatted a bit with the old-timer next door while I was digging and learned that he believed that he'd lost a gold band on my lawn, but that's probably over on the other side. Even though he was technically trespassing when he lost it, I told him that I'd look for it. A little karma would probably do me good. He didn't ask for it back, but there's no way that I could keep something like that.

That brings up an interesting question though - when one of the local yokels loses something valuable on my property while crossing it illegally, am I morally or legally obligated to return it to them if I find it? I would for this guy without hesitation, but I'm not so friendly with some of my other neighbors.

 

[BigWaveDave]

finders keepers

 

[Dave Rishar]

Today we hit Lulu Haddon park in Bremerton for a few hours. I'd known that there used to be an old school there that was torn down some years ago, and that the lot was more or less vacant until being recommissioned as a park. I figured that it would be full of trash but might have some interesting things, but there was no way to know for sure unless we had a look. As it turned out, I was partially right - it is absolutely full of trash 3-4" down, including what seemed to be parts of the school itself. It appears that the demolition was done somewhat haphazardly (surprise, surprise!) and that the trash situation was resolved by simply laying more turf over the top. We found a few clad and a very cool brass doorknob that had probably been part of the school (our very first find, actually) but I probably won't be back there. The amount of trash is just too great. Notable finds consisted of that door knob, my first "nail cache" (something like 6 or 7 nails in the same tiny hole) and some unfortunate individual's car key. We'll call this one a successful relic hunt on account of the door knob and leave it at that.

We shifted the hunt back to my front yard and it continued producing - a penny spill (earliest 1962, latest 1983), some more clad, and a necklace with beads and a peace symbol that appear to be stainless. Still, two pieces of jewelry for a small portion of a .07 acre city lot is fine with me. At this point, the girlfriend has more time on the new machine than I do and is really starting to get the hang of it, which makes my life (pinpointing and recovering) much easier.

Tomorrow we're going to hit an old homestead that I last dug 7 or 8 years ago. I was there in the summer and couldn't access most of the site due to the undergrowth; with luck, there should be a lot less of it this time of year. It will be interesting to see what I missed with the Tesoro the last time.

 

[Dave Rishar]

The homestead was every bit as frustrating as I remembered it on account of the extremely mineralized soil. The beds of the streams in the area are red from iron oxide, and the soil is so noisy that a handful of dug dirt can and will set off the pinpointer until it's spread out, at which case it's not concentrated enough to register as metal. We got good at spotting these sites very quickly.

I don't know what happened...either I hit that place a lot harder than I'd remembered, or else someone came in afterward and completely cleaned it out. I doubt that. It's a pain to get to, most people don't even know it exists, and since the county helpfully tore down the remaining chimney, a newcomer wouldn't even know that a home had been there unless they were told. There are some clues but they're not obvious ones. Additionally, metal detecting there is simply horrible, even with a high end machine and a lot of ferrous descrimination. It's just a bad site to hunt.

Anyway, we didn't find much besides rust pockets in the dirt. The girlfriend hit a very large ferrous target that looked like a sheet of steel or a car hood or something. It sounded hollow when struck with my e-tool but I wasn't about to spend the rest of the day digging the thing out with my tiny shovel. Perhaps we'll dig it out another day. I'm pretty sure that it's just buried junk, but one can never be sure until they dig. Aside from a particularly hot rock and a buckle for some sort of clasp that I found on the way out, I didn't find anything worth keeping. Another axe head would have been nice, but whatever...maybe the ones I picked up last time were all that there were.

Found some excellent leads for Bainbridge Island, then checked the park regs. That's not going to happen. We still might take a walk up to Yama one of these days to poke around a bit if there's nothing else going on. In the meantime, I've got a few more parks that I want to check and some private property on the list. Our trash experiences at nearly every site we've been to have convinced us that a small coil might be a wise investment, so we'll be trying that out next weekend.

The Etrac really impressed me today, not just with filtering out the worst of the signals but also with some of the things that we did find. That little clasp that I found was about the size of a zipper tab and when I finally grabbed it, my arm was nearly elbow deep in the hole. It was a very clear signal even in the middle of all that background noise, which is why I dug it; I don't remember the number on it, but it was something that I wouldn't normally dig. Basically I just wanted to dig one more item that wasn't a chunk of rust or a hot rock before leaving.

 

[Dave Rishar]

As we've been thwarted by densely cluttered areas of trash on every one of our outings but one, we figured that a small coil would be a good thing to own. We opted for the Sunray X-5. It arrived today. I get real uncomfortable hunting after midnight in my neighborhood but I went ahead and took it for a quick test run anyway, focusing on one of the noisy areas on my front lawn that I'd previously skipped over. Four holes resulted in two pennies, one dime, and yet another nail at 10-44. (I swear to all that is holy that every time I dig a 10-44ish target, it is a nail. Someone hates me.) One of those pennies took repeated shovel scoops to reveal and was a good 8" down, yet was a 1987. Most of the finds on my lawn are in the turf's root layer. Not sure how that sucker got down that far, but I was happy to get such a good signal on it.

No jewelry this time unfortunately, but finds are finds.

 

[Dave Rishar]

Spent another half hour today digging a bit more clad in the yard. The old-timer next door came out to chat a bit and mentioned that a friend of a friend owned a metal detector and hit all the yards on the block, but he hadn't been out in a year or two.

And here I was, trying to figure out how I was detecting my 80-year-old yard and finding nothing but clad and modern jewelry (including a few quarters and dimes from 1965). Now I know. Some jack@ss high-graded my lawn for me when I wasn't around to see it. Great. If he was ballsy enough to just hit yards like that without permission, I wonder where else he's been around here.

I suppose that I'll continue to pull clad out of it when I don't have the time to go someplace else, but man, this really irks me.

 

[Dave Rishar]

Struck out at Forest Ridge Park - $0.13 in clad, some junk, and various oddities.

We started at the scout house and gave up quickly; the ground there is horribly mineralized, and something was making the E-Trac warble continuously regardless of settings, or even how close it was to the ground. It really did not like that area. The umax required discrimination and sensitivity settings that basically precluded it from finding anything smaller than a manhole lid. This is where I found most of the coins.

We went up the hill to the old WWII-era foundations and found more interesting stuff, but nothing amazing - lots of old iron, old-fashioned pull tabs, etc. It seems to be the right area but there's just not much there. We may hit it again at some point, but there's not much left to cover and there are better places for picking up clad.

If you're curious, bring a detector that can handle bad soil. There was surprisingly little trash but the earth is very, very mineralized. There are entire areas where a Propointer will sound continously when waved over the ground. Also, expect some hot rocks. It's not the worst area I've detected in that regard, but it's a close second. The area by the playground and horseshoe pits is nowhere near as bad, but it was still a little chatty in spots.

We haven't decided on where we're going tomorrow, but it will probably be another park. We'll see.

 

[Dave Rishar]

Today we gave Evergreen a shot. I had a feeling that we wouldn't find much, and I was right. It's Bremerton's oldest park though, and we stayed in the oldest section, so there was no way of being sure without taking a look.

There were some very interesting targets next to the trees. After trying to dig one or two of them, now I know why they're there. One would need a backhoe to get those out. I'll tell you what, though...the next time that we get a big windstorm and one of those trees falls over, you're going to have to race me to the park.

 

[bazetech]

Sounds like your really getting to know your machine! That's awesome. For as hard as you're hitting it, the good stuff will start showing up!

 

[Dave Rishar]

Hit Norwegian Point yesterday. The girlfriend's new machine hasn't arrived yet, so she stuck to the beach with the uMax and I worked around the cabins with the Etrac. Other than some odds and ends, I found two zincolns and a whole lot of pull tabs and pop tops, both old and new. If someone had hit this site before us, they were either very good or they were just high grading. I'm noticing that at a lot of sites around here (including my front lawn) - plenty of pennies, tabs, clad, and the occasional piece of jewelry, but the coins are no older than 1965. I suspect that one or more people have been going hard for silver around here, in at least one case illegally. (Again, my front lawn.) We did find some nice rocks on the beach though, including a piece of "beach terra cotta", something that I'd never seen before. I would have actually been pretty happy with just that. It looks as if it might have started its life as a roof tile, but now looks like a giant river rock made of terra cotta.

Hit a local park today that we'd had poor luck with in the past. This time, I took my own advice and looked around a bit before figuring out where to start. I spotted an area that looked "original" and went there. The age of the coins went up, the pennies were all copper, and I got my first wheatie, a 1952 D - a pretty mundane find for some, but hey, firsties. Unfortunately I was only able to barely scratch the surface of this area, as the girlfriend stepped in a pile of excrement that had apparently been deposited by a dog the size of a Shetland pony; it actually went up to her ankle. The outing didn't really work after that and we called it off early, but I'll be returning, and I'll be watching where I step when I do.

 

[tacoma nick]

new to detecting any tips or pointers i am in tacoma wa

 

[Dave Rishar]

You're in an area much older than where I'm working, so that's good news for you. Get the hang of target recovery on your own lawn, then it's all about research and permission. I still find neat stuff on public land but the finds are better on private property. If you're going to be working in an urban area, EMI will be an issue. Shop for a machine accordingly. This was probably my biggest initial mistake.