just a question.

yes, that is right. you also want to search for rings with little or no discrimination to be able to find them, the same to finding nickles they are easy to discriminate out, so test your settings before hunting.

Nova Treasure
 

As Nove said, the detector only finds metal. If the ring is broken it also gives off a weaker signal that you might overlook. Make sure your detector can find pull tabs as this is where 90% of the rings are located.
 

Not to hijack the thread, but the original question appears to be answered so I wouldn't mind asking something a little more advanced.

Where do you feel the highest concentration of rings is usually found? Dry sand, wet sand, in the water? I haven't done any major beach hunting so I have a hard time understanding where to hunt to maximize my results. Do rings travel "down current" and end up in certain locations or do they end up staying where they fall most of the time? Do they tend to wash up on the beach? Etc.?
 

Sorry iliketofindstuff, I didn't mean to stomp all over your thread. :tongue3: ;D

You'll learn soon enough that I prefer to ruin other people's threads rather than take the chance that one I start will get ruined...
 

iliketofindstuff said:
why don't you get your own thread jb7487? HUH? HUH? jk ;D :P :laughing9: :wink:

You might have done well to allow others to ask questions you could learn from, or did you already know the answere?

Tim
 

jb7487 said:
Where do you feel the highest concentration of rings is usually found? Dry sand, wet sand, in the water? I haven't done any major beach hunting so I have a hard time understanding where to hunt to maximize my results. Do rings travel "down current" and end up in certain locations or do they end up staying where they fall most of the time? Do they tend to wash up on the beach? Etc.?

The vast majority of rings I find are in the water, anywhere from ankle deep to chest deep. Rings do sink fast, if dropped in shallow water they will stay pretty close to where dropped in fresh water, but in an ocean they can move a long ways before they settle, depending on the current, and wave action, once settled they then stay there until a storm, rip current or something else disturbs them. I have found several nice rings right at the water line, and a couple diamond rings in the sand, but majority is in the water for me. I found 5 on July 4 2008, 2 at water line, one in wet sand and 2 in dry sand. I didn't hunt in the water that day as it was very rough.

I had a couple ask me to look for a ring their 13 year old son lost that day, I found the ring several hours later at least a hundred yards from where they said they were when he lost it, and they said they knew he was never down that far as he stayed close to where they were sitting.
 

jb7487, I forgive you for hijacking the thread :laughing7: :laughing7: :laughing7:

I can comment on your question, as it pertains to ocean beaches (at least here on the west coast): There are no doubt rings on both the wet AND the dry. The reason the wet is better/funner to hunt though, is that:

1) after erosion (you gotta know how to interpret tides, swells, swell/wave direction, winds, etc...) there will be NO aluminum whatsoever. Mother nature takes all the light stuff out to sea, like a natural riffle board or sluicebox effect, leaving only the heavier objects. I have dug hundreds of targets after storm erosion, and never dug a single piece of foil or aluminum. It's pretty hard to go back to dry sand hunting after that 8)

2) Mother nature also tends, after erosion, to "group" the targets in pockets. So by "reading" the landscape of wet sand, you can learn where, in the scallop or cut or slope formations, that the targets will likely be. Pretty fun to work an area the size of your living room, for hours and hours, digging non-stop signals. On different days, the "pockets" will be at different parallels, or whatever. But once you're "into it", there's no random "roaming around" like the dry sand requires.

3) There probably are more rings lost in the wet, to begin with. Simply because cold waters shrink fingers. And the "frolicking around" that people naturally do, in the water, makes that more condusive to jewelry losses, to begin with. However, a lot of what a person finds on the wet, during erosion/storms, doesn't necessarily mean it was lost on the wet. It could have come from the dry sand, lost years ago, and just now brought to the wet by eroding sands. Of course this wouldn't apply to dry sand WAY back in the dunes (which haven't had water that high for hundreds of years), but it does apply to the mid-sections of the beach. Mother nature is always eroding and re-filling the beach. I've seen beaches, during severe storms, eroded all the way back to parking lots that used to be 50 to 80 yards from the water's edge! (of course those caliber storms only come every 5 to 7 years it seems).

And yes, sand does move laterally down the beach. Metal targets move with the sand. One big storm might move them out, and another storm moves them in. I have hunted in places where I've found silver and wheaties, in zones I am certain were "washed out" in a previous year. So that tells me that coins/targets come back in with the incoming sand.

But this is where it gets tricky: The sand coming OFF the beach might happen during monster storms. Whereas the INCOMING sand is usually more subtle (spring and summer buildup). I have often wondered if flat coins (easy to flip back and forth with the sand) , might not follow different rules than heavier gold. Ie.: Is the gold stuck out there off-shore in pockets somewhere? :P There is a certain world-famous touristy beach, beach that makes me think this is true: When a certain river wash turns to a torrent, and washes tons of sand out to the ocean, there will always be a followup phenomenom: When the sandbars begin to break up, all the coins that had gotten pushed out with the river sand, will subsequently show up DOWNSTREAM from that river's mouth. But what's wierd is, the gold ring ratio is very poor. So we sometimes wonder if the gold isn't sitting there in some offshore pockets. Anyone up for a scuba dive? I'll show them the spot :)
 

Treasure_Hunter said:
jb7487 said:
Where do you feel the highest concentration of rings is usually found? Dry sand, wet sand, in the water? I haven't done any major beach hunting so I have a hard time understanding where to hunt to maximize my results. Do rings travel "down current" and end up in certain locations or do they end up staying where they fall most of the time? Do they tend to wash up on the beach? Etc.?

The vast majority of rings I find are in the water, anywhere from ankle deep to chest deep. Rings do sink fast, if dropped in shallow water they will stay pretty close to where dropped in fresh water, but in an ocean they can move a long ways before they settle, depending on the current, and wave action, once settled they then stay there until a storm, rip current or something else disturbs them. I have found several nice rings right at the water line, and a couple diamond rings in the sand, but majority is in the water for me. I found 5 on July 4 2008, 2 at water line, one in wet sand and 2 in dry sand. I didn't hunt in the water that day as it was very rough.

I had a couple ask me to look for a ring their 13 year old son lost that day, I found the ring several hours later at least a hundred yards from where they said they were when he lost it, and they said they knew he was never down that far as he stayed close to where they were sitting.

Good info :thumbsup:

Do you think a fish picked it up and spit it out later, or just what would you attribute that much distance to, in such a short span of time?

GG~
 

good-guy, having looked for people's jewelry a lot, it is surprising how often someone will insist on where they lost it, where they were or weren't playing, etc... Yet the ring is out of those boundries. I am convinced that people, when they are doing an activity (like at the beach, etc...) just simply aren't aware of making note of exactly where they are standing, recreating, etc.... It's not until they've lost something, that they have to back-track in their minds, and try to re-create their steps. But since this wasn't something that had to register beforehand, they are now biased to certain memories, etc.. I mean, I walk up and down the beach, but if you asked me the next day: "where exactly did you walk?", why would I have made mental note of that, at the time? But still, people will insist to you that they were "here" or "there", but I always expand my search pattern, knowing this human nature.

Another factor is the "throwing" factor. A person playing volley-ball, or feeding seagulls, etc... can pitch a ring a long ways, outside of where they were actually at.
 

Tom, what you say is true many times, the couple was staying at a hotel on the beach, their son lost it the day before, there had been 3 tides since he lost it, and they could not believe where I found it.

They told me he lost it in the morning the day before I found it, it was a Christmas gift from the mom, while there were sitting in chairs in front of their hotel, and he never left their view, staying in front of where they were. It was New Years Day when I found it, and the surf was rough all weekend, moving a ring that far I think is normal under the conditions the surf was under.

I have seen people be wrong by 50 to 100 feet from where they think they lost something, but not by a 100 yards or more. I was down the beach 4 hotels from where they were staying, and from where they said he lost it. I found it several hours after I gave up looking for it for the mom, when I decided I wasn't going to find it.

I was at St Pete beach in the water when a couple about 20 feet away called to me saying, my husband just lost his ring would I look for it, he was standing where he lost it, afraid to move. I took my water proof Sov GT with the 15 inch WOT coil and worked a grid around him for at least 50 feet in all directions and never found it, buth there was also 2 foot waves and a strong current moving down the beach. I looked for over an hour, before they said they had to leave, and looked another 45 mins afterthey left, but never found it. My Sov GT with the WOT is really good in the water, the coil is hot and will ring on targets a couple inches outside the coil....
 

Tom and Treasure Hunter, thanks for the great info. I have lots to learn about beach hunting that's for sure!
 

Thanks, but I am by no means an expert. I have only been doing this for a little over 3 years, 90% of my hunting is water, and most of that is at the salt water beaches.

A lot of good people here gave me their time to answer my questions and told me when I was doing things wrong. I listen to them knowing I had a lot to learn and there was a lot of knowledge here and poeple to learn from. I read the Goldennolde website at Sandmans suggestion, bought the books on the excal, and did a lot of detecting.

One of the things I learned is, if I don't get the coil over the gold, I'm not going to find it, so I hunted a lot. I don't believe the beaches are hunted out, I just believe the gold is buried and waiting to be found............... IF we mowed grass like people hunt the beaches, the grass would be 10 feet tall in long rows as so much is missed.
 

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