Tomorrow could be a make or break day.

[Murph]

Just returned from another beach hunt. Tide was good and I was able to hunt a large section of wet sand that is normally under water. Got in a good hour of this before the beach walkers showed up and I moved up into the dry stuff.

Results; just another penny, nickel, dime, quarter, foil, pull tab kind of day. Every thing seems to be in place here. Highly visited tourist type public beaches decent amount of clad, all metal hunting and digging most everything and still not a single higher value target to be had.

To be honest, moral is starting to go in the crapper and expectations are getting even lower. If I am to believe post like this.

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,101006.0.html

And other post like it the ace 250 should be more than capable of pulling out some higher value targets if they indeed exist. I am not calling these people out as hoaxers but with each passing hunt it is becoming harder to believe.

Like the title says tomorrow could be a make or break day. Plan on hitting it before first light and hope for the best. If not I think I will just give it a break at least until the weather cools down or I decide to invest in a water machine. At this point I am even hesitant about that. The targets just don't seem to be there. I have all the crusty old pennies I can clean up now and paying off a thousand dollar detector with finds at this point seems pretty unlikely.

 

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[lowtones]

Where they drop coins they drop gold. Try working slower and keep that coil flat as a pancake to the wet sand. The gold will come .
Good luck
HH
Lowtones

 

[seas1to2]

are you hunting siesta Key.I was there Fri. an I havn't posted my finds yet , but I got 1 gold an 1 silver in the dry sand, an 2 junk rings in the water.there were 6 other people hunting that beach when i got there, 2 in the water an 4 in the dry sand.1 guy was using a 18" coil an covering alot of area, but most of the people I saw seem to be moving pretty fast, trying to grab as many recent drops as possible,I myself worked on trying to get the deeper stuff, while the gold was only maybe 4-6" deep the silver ring was well over 12" an came in as a zinc penny. I spent over 6 hours in the water for 2 junk rings an just over a 1$ in coins, you really never know were the good stuff is day to day.The beachs get a lot of hunters so its just being there at the right time.

 

[Murph]

Yesterday was lido and this morning was siesta. Cut it short this morning, even clad finds were scarce. I am pretty much at a loss as what to do next. I am leaning toward just throwing in the towel for now, the ace 250 just does not seem to be getting the job done. Siesta evidently got a lot of rain on Saturday and the sand was pretty wet. Ace was falsing all the way up to the lifeguard stands.

Kellyco is within driving distance so I think I will just stop putting hours on the ace and see if I can save some bucks and trade up to an excal. That probably wont happen until the first of the year so you may have one less competitor out there until then. You don't happen to be the guy I spoke to with the excal this morning are you?

Most all my hunts are first thing in the morning. Maybe I need to switch out to evening hunts. I also have not noticed as much competition as you mentioned, certainly not half a dozen at a time. Might try lido for your next hunt. There seemed to be some old clad there and as far as competition I have never seen anyone in the water on lido.

I made a drive down Venice way during the week and hunted Nokomis beach on the south end of Casey key. Beach looked awful and had the terraced look of a recently re-nourished beach. This must have freaked out the shark teeth hunter something fierce when they saw that for the first time. As far as finds just nothing but a few pieces of clad and the usual junk.

 

[willie d]

Murph, how long have you been detecting? The reason I ask is because I have been detecting for 7 1/2 years. Most of that was strictly beach hunting. I would spend 6-7 hours on average hunting the dry sand. I would start out digging EVERYTHING, then after my first few pieces of foil, I would adjust my discrimination. I would dig everything from nickel on up. I always keep my coil low and level and keep it slow. Despite all this, it still took me just over 5 years to find my first 10kt gold ring. It rang up as a pull tab. I can remember some days digging up beer cap after beer cap. Not only was it infuriating that they were bottle caps and not quarters but that beer and glass bottles were prohibited on the beach! MDing is not easy, if it were, everyone would be doing it. If you keep at it, the finds they will come.

As far as the youtube video goes, while I do believe the video, I will say these results are not typical. From the video, he refers to a lot of their finds from the beaches of Asia. The more people on a beach the more chances of them losing something. Last time I checked, Asia has a TON of people, not to mention the tourists from all over the world.

 

[rjnail]

we all have days, even months without finding any gold, when i first started, i thought i never find a gold ring, then one day i got two in the same day, then a few day without and so on, my best day was 21 pieces in one day, worst none ,haha.. but even if you dont find any all the time , dont feel bad. you got out for the day, you gave it your best shoot, even those that fish dont catch them ever trip out , and you know there fish out there, same goes with the gold , you got to go over it to find it,and you can miss it by 1/2 inch , nearing the end of summer here in my state, school started back, less at the swimming holes, been my worst year for hunting, and other their best, temps here been in the 100's over a week now, but no one been swimming, the lakes water temps been in the upper 9o's, so going swimming dont cool you off. always next year, are have to find an old swimming hole, be in daytona fisrt week in sept, for aweek , treasure_hunter and will meet up on the weekend for a hunt, if any one else like to join let me know, im there for 9/1 til 9/9

 

[Murph]

Well hopefully there is some inexperience at play here but to be honest with you the more I work with the ace 250 the less enthusiastic I am with it. It gets a lot of positive revues but being an entry level detector I suspect a good portion come from new hobbyist that are more easily impressed.

I too was pretty pleased with it at first. There is no denying it does vary well with coins. I even found a few coins in the wet and assumed it could do an adequate job there. But for other items??. I did a lot of air testing with the ace but today I finally set up a test beach of sorts and buried a few gold items in four inches beach sand.

A thin 14k gold band will air test as a nickel and lock on pretty hard. In the sand at four inches its a different story. Single jumped around as if it were a trash item and even gave tones in the iron range. I know freshly berried items will sound off different than ones heaving been in the ground for some time but to me this is still problematic and could explain a lot here (jewelry items that I can get to at the beach are pretty much freshly berried items). Add in some saltwater to the equation and the problems can only compound. Other items of gold behaved the same way. I do have one white gold large 14k ring that the ace ids consistently as a nickel no matter what the test conditions.

So now I have to think not just dig everything in the jewelry range with the ace 250 but also broken and junk sounding tones (basically every sound the machine makes). May as well be hunting with a PI unit and if I were; I think I may have done better, at least I could have hunted the wet without all the falseing.

I think its time to face reality here and concede the fact that I have the wrong machine for what I am attempting to do. The positive here is if there is some clad in the dry I have no doubt I can find it.

 

[gmanlight]

I dont trust all i see or read i do think the posts like this are pretty strait
A Md bud of mine has more rings this year than last 3 years including
PLAT with same detector I only have 1 925 and 10 junks BUT if you
can find junk you will find good stuff chin up GO GET EM

 

[-Jones-]

Hey Murph,

I share your frustrations!

Being from Missouri, and only traveling twice a year to FL, I too have detected hours on the beach/surf w/o finding the $$$ targets.

As for the posts, it's awful easy for someone to fab stories and show pics of stuff they never found! I'm sure it happens!

But I'm convinced there are $$$ targets to find! 8) And I'm sure most of the posts & pics are for real.

A few trips ago, my family was on Bowman's Beach and my teenage kid found this 14K band. About 5" down in dry sand. I gave him 50 bucks for it!

My last trip detecting West Palm Beach, I found this silver ring, it ain't worth much but it's very pretty.

On St. Pete's Beach I found this silver ring. Again it ain't worth much but a ring is a ring is a ring!

So just a taste of finds such as these, have me going back time and again detecting beaches and surf.

I don't know a thing about the ace 250. It's gotta be a good machine. 8)

I just bought 3 books.

Two written by Clynick, "Finding Gold, Silver & Coins with the Minelab Sovereign & Excalibur metal detectors" and "Advanced Methods for Finding Gold in the Water with the Minelab Excalibur".

And one written by Barthel, "The Beach Hunter's Guide"

So I've got some reading to do before the 28th!

 

[rob2646]

Sounds like you need an Excal. A low end detector is not going to complete with a high end, end of story. PI's are terrific, nothing beats their depth capabilities, but disc. purely by ear tone..and that can be iffy, so you end up digging just about everything. Maybe thats a smart thing, I know I've certainly done it. However the excal is I think the best of all worlds..fe disc, depth, tone id...lowtones are what you want...Its a lead weight detector but that can be mitigated with different methods.

I agree with yor assessment, trying to use the wrong machine for the task at hand. go excal.....

 

[Murph]

Yep I believe an excal is in my future. I keep researching water machines trying to justify spending a tad less money but when it comes right down to it all of the less expensive water machines lack the "total package" quality that the excal provides.

I probably wont be able to resist hitting the beach here and there with the ace in the mean time. I know it will do well with clad and silver (a silver ring is my only jewelry find with the ace) I cant knock the ace to much. As a entry level machine it has served it purpose. It only becomes suspect to me when it comes to gold items. Something I did not mention about my test garden was I had knocked down the sens to four bars and it was singling on a thin 14k band at four inches. Not to shabby and will eliminate a lot of falsing at waters edge/wet. Lower expectations will probably work in my favour also. Things tend to show up in the scoop when least expected for me. It was like that with the silver ring.

Like I said it probably wont be until the first of the year but this will coincide with our true tourist season and winter low tides. Going to take my bucket o clad found with the ace today and cash it in for lottery tickets. Maybe I will get lucky and have an excal for this weekend I am thinking scratch offs but lotto is up to 6 mil. I wonder if anyone will believe a post like, "6 million dollar find with ace 250".