Those are some pretty large holes, I can see lots of targets falling through. Like Treasure Hunter said, you need to get a long-handled scoop for hunting beaches and shallow water that have a combination of larger holes on the sides but smaller holes or rectangular cut outs in the center and/or back of bucket to capture smaller items. My long-handled scoop is 14 years old and has round holes, but they're smaller than the holes in your scoop. Your hand scoop is designed for the casual hobbyist and only really for dry sand. The large holes allow the dry sand to drain quickly from the bucket. When you find a target on the dry, you have plenty of time to futz around to try to find the target. But when you're on the wet and have rushing water coming in, or out working in shallow water, you don't want to keep losing your target back into the water. If you drop your small target onto the wet, and water comes rushing in, no telling where that target is gonna wind up. When on the wet or in shallow water, and you know the target is in your scoop, walk up quickly towards the high wet or into the dry to dump, then start searching through the sand to find.
Couple months ago, I took my "new to me" Dual Field PI out for the first time. I knew that PI's are very sensitive, but damn, I scooped out a target, ran coil over the pile, it was there, kept looking, it's in there, still can't find, feeling around with my fingers, I know it's in there, lol. I didn't have my pinpointer with me, so I just grabbed a handful of sand, ran over coil then had to start looking through small areas of sand in my hand. Finally found the sucker, it was a very small eyelet or rivet, about the size of a BB. It kept falling through the holes in my scoop, so I had to use my fingers to find it. It was several inches down, but my PI hit on that small rivet like I ran the coil over a refrigerator.
