Good deal on your trip to Florida. I have only hunted the West Coast Beaches at St. Pete and Clearwater but this is what I have done so far and I have been really successful in my limited hunts.
This is long but hopefully you or someone else will benefit from it.
Most everything I have found has been in the water. Law of averages I think. There aren't too many folks running around in the water with Detectors and there are tons of folks on the beach with them. While in the water, I have tried to stay at a depth no more than just below my chest and no shallower than my waist. I found that if I got deeper or shallower than that, I would tire quicker. In shallow water, the surf beat me up and my equipment felt heavier due to gravity and no support from the water. In the deeper water, I found that the effort of struggling to dig and find targets while keeping my head above water caused me to tire out. If you get there at low tide, you can hunt what is normally deeper water anyway.
The correlation of being tiredto how much you find is related to sloppy hunting techniques vs good techniques. Most of my finds come when I am fresh and paying attention to technique especially coil speed, coil direction and the height of the coil relative to the bottom. If you tire yourself out, the coil gets sloppy and at least in my case, I may as well be at home watching TV because the finds go to nill. It pays to pace yourself and take a break every now and then. I was tempted at first to hunt till I dropped and I did. I made myself sick by staying in the water too long. It was summer time with warmer water but you still suffer from core body temp loss even in the warmer water.
I wade into the the water until I reach a depth of breast level. I then turn and walk parallel to the shore maintaining a constant depth of water near my lower chest and then walk in a straight line as far as a dare go for the return trip. I often walk a quarter to a half mile or so then turn and come back. On the return trip back down the shoreline, I make sure that I move toward the shore enough that I can tell that I am in just a little shallower water as measured on my chest. This helps to make sure your are not covering the same ground as when you made your first pass. When I get to the end of that pass, I move in again until I can tell I am a little more shallow than the previous pass and so on and so on till I get to waist deep or whatever is comfortable in the shallow part.
By the time I have worn myself out in the water, it is usually late in the afternoon. I then move to the sandy beach since the population is thinning. (Make a note to look down the beach when you arrive for the day and you will clearly see that the bulk of the sun bathers have a certain distance from the high tide mark that they like to lay out there stuff on the sand. I stand at a point that is even to them and then pace that off to the high tide mark when I see it so that I can pace it off again in the evening when I start hunting on the sandy beach later in the day. Once the people leave the beach, you can't readily see where the "lay out" line was anymore.) I pace from the high tide mark to find that optimal location and then hunt the beach by walking as straight down that "lay out line" as I can maintain, just after everyone leaves. I drag my scoop behind me in the sand leaving a line so that I can see where I have been when I make the return passes coming back and forth. I continue to hunt into the night. I carry a small head mounted light for night hunting.
I seem to have been more successful in areas where there are no big resorts or hotels. I guess those folks leave their jewelry in the safes and stuff in their rooms although I have found some things in these locations, the bulk of my finds have come from places where folks don't have a room to come from. I get more finds in areas where people drive to the beach and walk to the water. My theory is that they bring their jewelry with them to the sand.
As far as choosing what to recover, I use a Garrett Infinium in the water which gives two signals, possible gold and possible silver. I ignore silver signals and dig gold signals only. My reason for that is because there is so much clad and other stuff like aluminum cans that give a silver signal that if I spend time digging all that, I am wasting time that could be spent finding gold. One good gold ring in my opinion is worth several silver rings and you don't usually find gem stones like diamonds in silver settings. Just my preference. I dig all possible gold signals which still nets me a great deal of junk like pull tabs and small pieces of aluminum.
In the surf when digging, I take one big dig with my scoop and if I don't have the target in the scoop after that, I stand over the hole that I have started and fan the hole with my foot in a kicking motion until I have fanned out a respectfully deep area then check to see if the target popped out. It usually does come out either in the front or behind the hole and then I just scoop it off the top of the sand. I can see the item laying on the bottom if the water is clear enough. Wear shoes or booties if you do this, there are things that can cut your feet up in the water. On shore, it is business as usual for land digging.
I have a new Sovereign that I hunt with on land now in combination with using my Infinium in the water. There is more trash on land than in water and I will dig myself to death on land with the Infinium in high trash areas because it is a PI machine. It picks up bottle tops which is in abundance on shore. The Sovereign ignores most of them. The Sovereign also ignores most bobby pins and some other items that are plentiful on shore but finds the gold. I dig more clad with the Sovereign because a large gold ring can give an audible tone similar to a zinc penny. I can also use the larger coil on the Sovereign to cover the greater amount of land to hunt as opposed to the water.
Good luck to you and I hope you find some good stuff. I would say on your first couple of hunts to dig everything until you become accustomed to how your detector reacts to items. Once your wife holds a free gold ring, necklace or the like especially with a diamond attached, she will be wanting you to buy two water machines!!!!! Heck my wife encourages me to hunt now!
DaChief
Guzz1
