The Golden Olde

The Long Hunt

Winter comes to the Gulf coast and with it some of the very best time to hunt. If you can brave the icy winds and freezing temperatures you can hunt the minus tides and walk right through the swimming areas. It occurred to me this morning as I hunted the low tide that I walk as much as ten miles some days and that is swinging my detector and digging foot deep holes all down the beach.
The problems occur when you get used to the pace and do not recognize the right place to stop walking and swinging and just putter around in a circle to look for more good signals.
It seems to be a true statement that if you are going to dig up gold jewelry then you will find it in a patch of coins. Coins mean one thing and that means that you have had some beach erosion and the other hunters that walk the beaches have not found this spot.
However these patches can be overlooked very easily when you are swinging long distances without any good signals and then pick up a coin. Instead of continuing on walking it is advisable anytime you detect a coin spot you should completely cover a spot about 30 feet in diameter.
Almost everyone discovers the gold shows up on a detector as a pulltab however do you dig up every pulltab signal you find in ten miles? No! And this is what separates the successful hunters from the ones that can never find jewelry. I can find areas that have produced loads of gold but like this morning 100 out of 100 signals were pulltab and I admit I dug altogether too many of them without any coins in the area. This is another bad habit a hunter can get into and believe it or not I dug so many pulltabs today without swinging consciously about it and of course they were ALL pulltabs. Depending on your detector you may notice gold rings can be found under Nickle or Foil also. My CZ20 just indicates pulltab or coin. The same thing goes for Nickle and Foil signals also and for purposed of consideration in this article just consider them all pulltabs.
You are not an inexhaustiable resource and you will tire if it doesn't kill your back digging too many pulltabs. Speaking of pulltabs; now there is another bad guy on the beach. We had tabs with tongues, square tabs and all of these rang up as pulltab but the new square tab is not completely square and has ears on one end and it will ring up as a coin most of the time or ring up as coin and pulltab which of course a deep coin may loose ID and flicker back and forth between coin and pulltab so it is difficult to tell unless you dig. I HATE them!
It seems a little silly that approaching the year 2000 and the manufacturers have not even considered that they should develop a hi-tech machine that CAN tell the difference between pulltabs and gold rings!
To sum up what you learned here today is you can walk fast as you want and swing wildly but stop and circle on the FIRST coin and dig all pulltab signals because that is where you will find gold. Second remember NOT to dig all pulltabs in miles of beaches UNLESS they are accompanied by coins. This will prove out in the long run and it will be a more effective way for you to hunt the wet sand.
The problem that we hunters fall into is to fall into the same pattern that we used before but winter hunting is done when the beaches are covered up with several feet of sand and there is enough gold and diamonds in the beach under your feet to fill your hat but you cannot detect them that deep nor can you dig that deep. You must wait until wind and tide works to remove some sand and enough for you to reach the goodies.
In the spring sand is building the beach and you have to race down the wet sand to pick up all goodies before they are covered up too deep to reach and do it often and after every weekend and holiday. They are not found in patches as the winter goodies are and it is a simple matter of walking and digging.