On the left is pictured Royal Ottmar, and on the right is Francois Stadler.
Francois comes from Montreal, Canada and Royal is from Waterford Michigan.
Royal came down to beach and surf hunt at Galveston and he uses a Fisher CZ20 with a 10 1/2 inch coil but Royal primarily treasure hunts while scuba diving and he has lots of nice finds to prove it. These forms of metal detecting are more demanding and require much more experience to find the good coins and jewelry than coinshooting in the park on a summer day. Timing is everything here at Galveston and if you hit the right tide but the wind is off a little you can't get to the goodies. Francois used the Minelab Excaliber and has done well with it water hunting in Montreal as you will see.
On the right the pictures represent Royal's finds including loads of silver coins, he sold many of gold rings.
The antique bottles he picked up off the bottom of the river while detecting. The picture on the left represents the rings found by Francois while water hunting.
All the rings that Francois found in the Montreal area in 1997, (from May to Nov.) The 2 top rows are all gold
rings with diamonds, one in particular is a 24 carat with 6 diamonds (the square ring). Not shown are 6 rings he gave to his wife and kids and one of those was appraised $1.5K. He also found a boat brass propeller in excellent condition about 15" inches in diameter.
In Royals picture in the top right corner is a pile of Silver quarters and the bottom right corner are mostly Buffalo nickel's. The lower middle is silver halves and the left bottom is silver dimes (mostly Mercury). There are some arrow heads and spear points and a white peavey he found at a lumbercamp. There are two nice piles of rings he found not to mention some fishing reels.
You can easily see that some of the best finds are under the water and harder to get to but the rewards are worth the trouble and the expense is paid back faster than almost any other method of metal detecting
If you have discovered an unusual find and want to be considered for the Spotlight page then email the author and attach a picture of you and your prize in a *.JPG file. For instructions concerning these picture file attachments email the author
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