5 gold rings in one trip.... I haven't found anything gold in six months. If my beach were a field, it would have been stripped by detectorist locusts long ago.
CH, I don't think you realize how far you've come since you started posting. I remember you posting over and over about finding nothing, nada, just pull tabs & junk. Then one day, you posted about finding your first bling. OK, it wasn't gold or silver, but it was bling and is in the family of targets that you're looking for. Most recently you posted about finding some rings and more bling. Again, not gold or silver (one was gold plated?), but you're now starting to find the right kind of targets you've been looking for. Not all rings are gonna be gold & silver, many these days will be SS or Titanium or some other metal. But you're starting to find rings & bling. Keep going, at some point, odds are that one will be gold/silver.
FWIW, I'd like to offer you 2 suggestions I think will help you. Whether you act on these is your call, but I have the benefit of being able to look back over the last 56 years of detecting, 14 of those years on the beach/shallow water, to see where I went wrong, what I did right, etc. These are 2 sincere suggestions based on my personal experience. Hope they will help you.
1. Read, Study, Learn
You're not going to get a complete detecting education on the forums. Forums are great for asking specific questions, opinions on gear, chit-chatting, etc. But you have to realize you'll be getting a wide variety of info/opinions, from a wide variety of guys with varying levels of experience. Some info will be contradictory, and knowing what info is correct can be difficult to those new to the hobby. Gotta be careful here, believe it or not, some guys are “wannabe’s”, they think they’re “experts” but they’re just “armchair warriors” that don’t even hunt, and they’ll just repeat what they’ve read or heard. You want to learn from guys that are actually hunting out in the field/beach. Plus, common sense tells us that most guys won’t post their specific hot spots or secrets they’ve discovered through years of study & hard work on a public forum for the world to see. Most will keep the good stuff close to the vest. “God feeds all the birds of the world, but he doesn’t drop the seed in their nest”, they gotta go out and find those seeds. For us, we gotta go out and hunt, gain our own experience while continuing to learn from those more experienced to improve our knowledge and skills.
If you want to learn and learn quickly, you need to focus on learning from the Pro's. There
ARE many Pros on several Detecting forums I belong to, like OBN, CJC, Treasure_Hunter, Blak Bart, FelixtheCat, VaBchMax, Cfmct, just to name a few, there are many more. They’re Pros, but if you ask them, they just think they’re regular/normal guys who just have a lot of experience. You can usually tell by the pics of their finds they post. But some Pros don’t post pics of their finds, preferring to remain silent & under the radar. So I
highly suggest that you start reading some detecting books from Pro's like Clive James Clynick. He's on some of the forums, goes by "CJC". He's written 24 metal detecting books, Love them! I have several of them right next to me, and he has a site listing all his books (clivesgoldpage (dot) com). And guess what? The first book listed is “The Minelab Manticore: Tips, Tricks and Settings”. You have a Manticore eh? Get that book, read & learn,
AND read Minelab’s operator manual for the Manticore, get really familiar with your machine.
I have a Minelab Sovereign, so I have Clive’s Sovereign book that covers Beach, Inland, & Shallow Water Hunting. I have his books on Site Reading Beaches, Shallow Water Hunting, Pulsepower PI, and since I recently acquired a Dual Field PI, I’ll be getting his Surfmaster PI Dual Field Advanced Guide. His books are focused either on specific metal detectors, or beach/water hunting, like Site Reading beaches, Water Hunting Secrets, etc. Start building your library so that you can learn directly from a Pro. BTW, Clive gets some of his pics & some info/tricks/techniques from other Pros he associates with; I know one of the guys. Nobody knows it all, so by reading his books, you’ll get an accumulation of knowledge from a variety of other Pros as well.
2. Learn to Discern
This is a life skill that you should work to develop, also known as being able to “read between the lines”. Most Pros aren’t going to hand you all their closely guarded secrets on a silver platter. They may give a tip or two to help guide you, but if you can read between the lines, many times they’ll give much more casually during an interview, conversation, or by posting a pic(s). Trick is, you gotta be able to discern what they’re saying or showing (read between the lines) to get some great nuggets they may just casually mention. 2 examples:
Terry Shannon - I’ve had 2 theories/ideas about beach hunting floating in my head for the last dozen years. Recently, I watched a video of Terry Shannon being interviewed. During that interview, while Terry was casually speaking, he confirmed both of my theories/ideas, so I knew I was on the right track. He also gave 2 friggin’
HUGE tips during that interview, but he didn’t come right out and say, “here’s a tip”. He just casually dropped those tips while speaking. Most guys probably wouldn’t know they were tips; they would probably fly over their heads. But I was paying close attention to what he was saying, rewound a couple times to hear again, and those 2 tips I picked up were tips I never see anyone mention on the forums. And I never see other detectorists out on the beach using those tips. I listened to what he said, read between the lines, and pulled a couple of great tips out of his conversation. He was just chatting and may not have realized he was handing out some great nuggets.
OBN - Take another look at OBN’s post above, reread the post, look at the pics, then stop and think about what you’re seeing. There are some great tips hiding in that post for those who can read between the lines. To cut to the chase & save time, I’ll tell you what I see & get from OBN’s post:
Pic 1: Huge honking ring, self-explanatory. That’s the prize OBN found during this particular beach hunt. So how did he find that? Keep reading.
Pic 2: Storm is coming in, huge waves pounding the shoreline. There are many treasures to be found on the beach/wet/water. They may just be covered by too much sand, making them deeper than your detector can locate. But when storms/huge waves are pounding the shoreline, sometimes they’ll remove sand, rather than depositing more sand. When they start stripping sand off the beach, the more sand that’s stripped, the closer any targets buried deep become, and can come within range of your detector. This is why you hear that one day, a guy will find lots of goodies on the beach, but next day at the same beach, he might not get any signals at all. Newbies will scratch their heads in confusion, but experienced beach hunters know that the treasure is still there, it’s just covered by too much sand. But if you can go after a storm strips a few feet of sand, you’ll be a few feet closer to the targets that were previously buried so deep, that your detector just couldn’t reach down far enough. The treasures
ARE there, just might be too deep under too much sand at the time you’re searching. But go another day when sand has been stripped/removed, and chances are your luck will improve dramatically.
Pic 3: TV screenshot of a weatherman showing the size of the incoming waves that have been pounding the shoreline. This reinforces that it’s important to know about waves, intervals, tides, current, winds, direction, etc. You can look at that pic and determine that this storm might be one that strips sand. And if it strips sand, you want to get out there as soon as the storm passes and things calm down just a bit to take advantage of being able to locate targets that were previously out of reach, covered by too much sand.
Pic 4: This pic is a
BIGGIE, so I’ve attached for reference. Take a close look at that pic, what do you see? The reason OBN found that Huge honking ring is plain as day and actually lines up perfectly with and reinforces where
YOU found those recent rings. Here’s what I see in that pic. There’s 4 guys hunting, 2 of them are together working the dry. One guy looks to be working the high wet, and one guy is working shallow water. Who’s the guy working shallow water and what did he find? Of course, that’s OBN working the shallows and he found that Huge ring. The other guys are working the dry and high wet, but OBN is in the water and scored big time. And if I recall, didn’t you say in your recent post about finding a few rings & bling, that you found those rings in knee deep water? Hmmm, see any correlation here between where you found those rings and where OBN found that Huge ring? Put 2 & 2 together and you have the answer.
