|
Going
Slow
The Fundamentals Of Being Slow
Are the quantity of your finds dropping off? Are you hunting places
you know should be producing coins and relics but coming up dry?
Not only should you slow down your pace, but you might want to alter
the way you swing your coil.
Because I’m not a cold weather person, I put the detector away
once the middle or end of October rolls around. Once the new hunting
season starts in spring, I find I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned
the previous season, so I have to spend a little time working on
my detecting fundamentals. The grounds of a public elementary school
and a forest preserve a few blocks from my house is perfect for
this. The school is very trash free and holds a ton of clad, while
the forest preserve has clads hiding under enough metallic trash
from beer and pop cans to build a few orbiting space stations. If
you toss in the fishing lake there, there’s enough aluminum for
the Zippo lighter company to smelt down into enough lighters to
supply soldiers in every upcoming war well into the third millennium.
The typical way to swing the coil is in a fairly wide, sweeping
semi-circle in front of you. While this covers a lot of ground,
it opens the door to missing a lot of ground as well, especially
if you don’t always walk in deliberate, measured steps or set up
some sort of marked grid. If you swing your coil this way, the next
time out change your swing to a pattern that extends in a straight
horizontal line no wider than the width of your shoulders. Not only
is it easier this way to overlap your swings by one-half the width
of your coil and cut down on the number of false signals (the ones
you get when you reverse direction at the end of the wide-arc pattern
because you’re swinging too fast), but you’ll undoubtedly see the
quantity of targets increase.
I discovered this last weekend, while doing some technique refreshing
down at the sand area of the kiddie playground at the grammar school.
Because it’s close to home and a good producer given the army of
kids in our neighborhood, it’s a site I hit hard throughout the
year. I had been there twice a few days earlier in the week, when
the weather started getting warmer and I had an hour to kill here
and there after work. Working the entire area, I picked up a few
dollars in clads and two cheap tin kiddie rings. Last Sunday, with
only a few hours available for hunting, I went back to the kiddie
play area with the intent of hunting it as slowly and thoroughly
as possible. This time, because I was working much slower and deliberately
than usual, I found myself naturally swinging the coil in the narrow
shoulder to shoulder pattern instead of my usual wide arc.
The difference was astounding. It took me three times longer to
cover less than half the area I usually do, but the extra time was
worth it. From only a quarter of the sand play area, I dug two keys,
a key-shaped key fob, a magnet, a cub scout neckerchief slide, a
nickel pierced earring, and four kiddie rings (one copper with bear
paw design), three tiny whatsits of different metallic content and
$1.46 in clad. With the exception of one of the rings, which was
practically sticking out of the sand, all these objects were in
the three- to five-inch range and were obviously lying in the ground
for some time. One of the keys, the key fob, the copper ring, the
earring and the neckerchief slide had corrosion, and the silver-colored
plating was starting to show signs of bubbling on one of the rings
(a really cool falcon design in which the wings formed the finger
wrap). Several of the clad coins showed signs of being in the ground
for some time, too.
In the world of metal detecting, coming away with a pocketful of
cheap tin rings and other assorted non-valuable finds is strictly
nickel and dime stuff. Child’s play, if you will. But take the same
technique to the beach where expensive jewelry is lost, or to old
homesteads where relics of all sorts lie waiting to be found and
things change substantially. Work your sites with your discrimination
set as low as you can tolerate it and you should see your find quotient
start climbing.
© 1999 Scott Buckner
---[ Home, James! ] [ Back To Archive ]---
|