The bane of my Infinium has always been the never ending supply of bobby pins I pull out of the dry sand. The Ace 350 showed up today and bobby pins become invisible with the first notch of iron descrimination. Thank god. I think the machines will complement each other nicely.
Bad-monkey, I see from your avetar that you are from Monterey, CA area, right? I'm from Salinas and have detected our beaches here since the late 1970s. Seen some episodes of great storm erosion action too on some years
Although the last few years have been very lame for erosion. No good swells coinciding with the right winds, directions, tides, etc...
As far as trying to use a pulse machine on our beaches, I feel your pain! The manufacturers that advertise those beach machine heavily tout them as "beach machines" that can "
cut through the nastiest minerals", and
"go super deep" on the "
smallest of fine chains" and so forth. And yes, all those things are undoubtedly true. So the poor newbie goes out and buys a pulse machine for the beach, and attempts to use it on beaches that had industrial history of burned down piers, commercial fishing type history, or beaches that had beach-side dumps that have tumbled down from the dunes during past erosion, etc.... And pity that poor soul with the pulse machine when he gets an average of 20 nails and bobby pins to any single conductor. Doh! Oh sure, the black sand gives him no troubles, and sure, he gets deeper than the guy with the Excal or Sov or whatever. But Lord help him when he gets on to a beach with lots of nails.
The hardcore beach pulse guys will try to tell you that they can tell nails and bobby-pins apart from coins and round targets (by sounds, double beeps, etc...). But if you press them, they'll admit that those "sound tricks" don't work when the nail is bent. And "nagging doubts" will send them digging a bunch of them "just to be sure". Bottom line is, I've seen a LOT of guys over the years at our beaches show up with various beach pulse machines. Only to be "sent packing" when they start encountering lots of nails, bobby-pins, BB's, etc.... Oh sure, they'll get an earring stud that a discriminator would miss. Granted. But they never get to that point, because they get sick of digging the iron.
Quite a few of them make the switch to something with the ability to knock out iron, as soon as they see those of us with discriminators effortlessly working in iron ridden zones. And depth is "hardly the issue" when mother nature has left targets as fast as you can dig them. Nor is black sand an issue on 99% of our beach zones here. So .... welcome to the harsh cruel reality that the pulse advertisements don't tell you about
The places where a pulse would be "at home" is an environment where a) touristy Bay-Watch type beaches, where they are clean and strictly touristy b) or where nasty black sands render a standard machine un-able to get depth c) places where there is no past industrial history, no beach-bonfires (which introduce nails through burnt pallets) or commercial/industrial usage.
So the only places I've ever seen the pulse have any place at here, is sometimes at Carmel (which is strictly touristy, with no commerical/industrial past), or Santa Cruz main (ditto). But even on those two beaches, when the pickens are hot (after erosion has left target zones as fast as you can dig), then you DON'T want to even average a 1 to 1 nail-per-conductor target ratio, because speed becomes the name-of-the-game in those conditions.
I know I'll garner the wrath of faithful beach pulse guys by saying all this, but this has just been my observation on the type beaches I'm hunting.
Do you still have your beach pulse? There's a particular dry sand zone, on a particular beach, that I've pulled about 100 silver coins from over the past few years (1 to 3 at a time, per hunt), and scores of wheaties. I have a feeling that a little more depth than my explorer provides will yield yet more silver coins. If you're game to get together and give this a whirl, I'll turn you on to where it's at. Drop me a PM and let's give it a whirl with your pulse machine.
