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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

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Going Slow

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