Ever plan the perfect hunt? Ever commit the resources, the time, and everything to make sure it comes off just right? Then everything comes together.... The weather is good, the big crowds are there dripping with gold, they wear it into the surf and then lay around in the water and do just about every silly thing you can imagine. Well under circumstances like that you would say that the water would be loaded with gold. It generally is, but this time? Things were different.

I am talking about the Labor day holiday of course. There must have been millions of 'em. The cars were over three deep and the beach umbrellas were full everywhere. The weather was super hot and a clear blue sky so that they would have to lay around in the shallow water to cool off. I hunted so hard and found nearly nothing that I continued to hunt out of sheer frustration. I felt that somehow it must be my fault but the truth is I covered the area over once and they just did not loose anything.

Do you see anything wrong here? We camped at the beach too in the RV and hunted morning, afternoon, and late evenings. Sure there were other hunters but they didn't seem to hunt seriously or they hunted the wrong areas or with machines that were not up to the task. Now I have been out foxed before when a group of hunters would come in during the night and clean out the whole area and by dawn they were gone with all the gold too. That didn't happen this time because the people just didn't loose it. I was there all day and they were not loosing anything outside of a few pennies and a half dozen quarters.

The point of this article is to accept the facts, ignore plans, stay flexible and do not frustrate yourself trying to do the impossible. I should have realized that there was not enough drop to justify the hunt. I did, but was not flexible enough to change the plans. I just hunted harder and longer in the hot sun trying to make it pay. I should have moved to other beaches and tried the water there to see if the mind-numbing effect was there too. The trouble is I kept trying to prove to myself that the gold HAD to show up. It didn't! The whole long weekend didn't produce as much as one fairly good day at the beach any day of the summer would have.

That is the problem when you sit around all year and wait for the big day to arrive. Dreams and reality seldom match up but it was strange. Maybe the gold they wore was painted on.... Maybe not, but they didn't loose it.

Generally it is very easy to pickup about five gold rings and a bunch of coins and other trivia. I hunted hard enough to have produced twice that. Oh, we found only a tiny taste of gold all right, two extremely tiny gold rings that wouldn't have weighed a gram and two or three silver but that was no big deal.

I think that we can all learn to be more adaptive to the situation. We can accept the facts and modify our plans soon enough to change the outcome. The simple fact is that if you are water hunting and looking for gold then there should be lots of other things in the water too. On a weekend like that I should have been finding quarters nearly everywhere out there, a watch or two, several rings of keys, and lots of junkie jewelry like cheap earrings.

None of that stuff showed up either. I shrugged it off and kept at it though. I should have pulled up stakes and motored on down the coast to look for a better spot. Either that or just wrote off the whole long weekend and gone home and kept cool and dry.

I will give you a tip, a good one too, on a day like that when the water is usually full of treasures most people just can't overlook the easy quarter so they dig coins. If you are wasting your time digging coins when gold is in the water you will be outdone every time by guys like me who only dig the gold signals. As it turned out I could have dug pennies and still had time because the water was bare.

Accept the real-time facts and learn, learn, learn. Never be so fixed that you can't quickly change your plans. I see people that come for long distances to beach hunt and the truth is that the water does not produce everyday and sometimes they could just turn around and go home bare handed instead of doing like I did and ignoring the facts. Lets all work harder on that one. I wrote this article mainly at me, I should have known better but I was too pig headed. Next time I will try harder and stay flexible enough to change my plans.