When you say you want one that can search at water, do you mean actually
IN the water? As in snorkling, diving, or in any other way routinely submerging/dunking the machine? Because if you only meant beach detecting (but not actually wading out and submerging), then any land machine would work (assuming it's not one that "doesn't like" wet salt). There a lot of great land machines that also work well for casual beach hunting. The coil of all them is waterproof, if you were to wander in and out of the ebbing surf as it laps at your feet.
The Excaliber is expensive, and takes some getting used to. You can't swap coil sizes (as it is hard-wired). The long drawn out "booongggs" might drive you batty at first. It lacks the target-separation that you might want at some junky iron-ridden land sites, but yes, *could* be used on land.
But if you happen to like the characteristics, sounds, TID (screens/graphs, etc..) of various land machines, you are not prohibited from taking it to the beach (even the wet beach), as long as you don't intend to submerge the box. Heck, I've even taken various Whites and Garret coin/land machines to the beach in rip-roaring winter storm erosion times, where rain is hammering me, waves are hitting me full frontal, etc... I just wrapped the box in plastic real well before heading out. If you did a LOT of storm hunting, or deep wading, then yes, a fully waterproof machine is simpler. But for just casual beach hunting, you don't necessarily need a waterproof machine.
PS: by noting the exception in my first paragraph: "As long as it's one that doesn't like wet salt", that applies to certain land/coin machines like various 2-filters that don't do well in heavy minerals (but have great application for other things), and some cheapie machines that are just lame from the get-go. Most 4-filter machines & multi-frequency machines do just fine in minerals and salt.
PPS: If the beaches where you intend to hunt are gunpowder grey or black-ish, then you could be at a rare beach where the minerals are so bad, that only a pulse will cut it. I don't think that's applicable to anything on the gulf though. Your beaches, as I understand it, are nice white low-mineral beaches, so you don't need to limit yourself to a pulse with no ability to reject nails & iron. Of course there are
other pros & cons to the pulse vs discriminator debate (size targets they can hone in on, depth, etc..), but just limiting the topic to ability to do a certain sand type or not, is all I'm addressing here
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