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New Patch Gives Gold X 2


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6 hours ago, Deft Tones said:

Good luck!

 

Ya know, I question the conventional wisdom that one must hunt water or sand to find the most gold jewelry. Yes, they are commonly lost at those places, and concentrated (if you find a virgin area) but most people spend 99% of thier lives on dry land away from the beach. Whatever quantity of gold is lost and concentrated at the beach must pale in comparison to what is lost and semi-concentrated to scattered on dry turf.

Then there is competition from past and present. Beaches seem to be the place for low hanging fruit and easy harvest, but those locations are mostly about recent drops anymore. Who can get the coil over it first, or punches deepest gets the gold!

At parks, in my area at least, these shallow rings might have seen a hundred coils over them before me. They were found in high probability locations, right where they ought to be, but they were never dug.

Energy spent may be a factor for some, but consider the energy spent walking miles of beach, swinging and only occassionally digging  due to distance between signals. On turf one can hunker down in a 100' area and easily pop shallow targets left and right, expending more energy digging and less energy walking and swinging. My beach experience was more walking and less digging  while my park experience is the opposite. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not out swinging for a walk, I'm out swinging for gold to dig so I prefer to spend time digging in signal dense high probability sub-locations when I'm after it. Just like a beach, gold can be anywhere at a park but it tends to be in somewhat predictable zones where it's expected to be...only very few people seem to try. In my area that's just fine to me.

Which gives me a basic idea for a personal challenge and experiment. 24 hour gold challenge! - semi-random selection of a park by someone else with a 24 hour time limit to find gold there.

One would really have to be selective in many areas of detecting to pull it off more than a few times.

.....just ramblin' on over coffee... :rolleyes:

 

 

How many pull-tabs did you have to dig before you found a gold ring, Deft?  My problem is not finding rings,  I've gotten 3 in the past 3 days.  One tiny little silver, and the other two are titanium junk.  I'll take you up on that challenge.  Give me a city and I'll pick a park for you!

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Tough question!

Short answer: not too many.

I'll briefly explain.

When I started looking for gold jewelry in my second detecting year, that's when I set my mind determined to find one item made from gold, it took maybe three months tops. The first find was the most difficult because I didn't have any real gold jewelry to test and I was without a reference point other than the scale on the bottom of the V3i box...and I didn't really know what kind of signal I was looking for. I began to notch (zero-tone on the V3i) all the common repeating trash and focused on the gaps between them. If, on the conductivity scale, gold fell into the square tab and ringpull range I'd never hear them. I was searching the conductivity scale between them and avoiding those areas because I didn't want to find ALL the gold, just my first gold....anything gold. It didn't take all that long and mostly was canslaw digging.

The real challenge was that it took 5 years to find a gold ring that would VDI and spectragraph just like a ring-pull!

I'm not sure when I'll be able to start or complete the challenge at this time, but if you want to choose a park for me to try this personal challenge at I'm game. I'll select a city near my own that I've never been hunting at. (I suppose several years back I did spend 45 minutes hunting one park in Ankeny while my wife was in appointments.)

Let's do either Ankeny, IA, or Altoona, IA. Should have a good selection of parks to choose from within these two surrounding communities. Both were small communities that experienced very rapid growth over the past 25 years. Pick a park greater than 5 acres (most of them are around here). :smile:

 

 

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OK, Deft.  I studied Google maps and the Ankeny Parks And Rec Dept website.  Hard to tell if you've never been there, but Ankeny seems to be a bit more well-to-do?  I looked at it like it was one of our stops on the way to Montana (might actually be, if they have an RV park!) and I had about 2-3 hours to go find something.  And the winner is....Northcreek Park.  Big tot lot, soccer fields, etc in what looks to be an affluent neighborhood.  But what really sold me on it was ......snow sledding in winter.  I don't know if they actually sled down that hill in winter, but with all the kiddos that might live in that neighborhood, they probably do.  And well-off, professional parents with cold hands pushing junior on a sled in deep snow (pull those gloves off,  mom!) seems to me like a recipe for losing jewelry and not finding it.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

Sherry

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Ankeny and Altoona are mostly middle class to upper middle class and yes, there are more high-end upper-class homes in Ankeny primarily because of the lake nearby. By my level of comfort and standards, there isn't a rough neighborhood anywhere in those cities. I selected those cities pretty much on population size as they are about the same size, or were in the recent past. They do have RV parks nearby both cities. Ankeny draws the lake crowd, Altoona draws the amusement/waterpark and casino crowds. They're 15 minutes apart, too. I've only hunted Heritage park in Ankeny for about two hours.

Northcreek Park it is. That's an interesting choice. Not my first choice, but I like that a school is nearby, even if it is elementary. I've never been there to that park, and I'll wager that not many have detected there at all. Was all farmland until the mid-late 80's if memory serves. (I have worked building many of the homes in the area back in the 90's.) I'd be surprised if that park was more than 25-30 years old.  Should be ultra-low trash in ground though.

I may be able to do my initial scout of the park this week. This will be fun. Obviously with park hours I can't do 24hrs straight through even if I wanted to, so I'll chronograph the time and track over several detecting sessions. I'll start a new thread after getting in an initial hunt. Can't wait to give it a go.

Thanks for playing! :cool:

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I might play along too!  I haven't gone after park jewelry with the DFX in years.  I will be waiting for a little cooler (not 90's) weather so Hubby can go with me.  We have some similar little parks in North Melbourne in the Viera area on the mainland.  I'll have to go over there since our little beach town has outlawed metal detecting, even on the beach!  I'll be using the 6 X 10 Eclipse and I'll be going after shallow targets (4 inches or less), no bottle caps, and nothing in the pull-tab range either.  I think I might keep all my trash too, just for comparison.  It will be interesting to see what we come up with in 2 very different areas of the country.  

 My park will have to wait until after we see what that freakin' hurricane is going to do.  We may be hooking up the RV and getting the heck outta Dodge soon!  Of course, if it scrapes 50 years worth of sand off the beaches, I'll be busy looting and pillaging with the rest of the pirates when we get back.  :biggrin:

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 9/5/2017 at 5:03 PM, MontAmmie said:

...since our little beach town has outlawed metal detecting, even on the beach!...

Wait..! What..??

Ohai.. Welcome back, me.. Sure has been fun cleaning up after Irma.. Even my kids were neater..

Sherry, where you talking about..? I had no idea there's beach S of Pineda Cswy whos community has mandated detecting illegal..?

Swamp

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5 hours ago, Swampstomper Al said:

Wait..! What..??

Ohai.. Welcome back, me.. Sure has been fun cleaning up after Irma.. Even my kids were neater..

Sherry, where you talking about..? I had no idea there's beach S of Pineda Cswy whos community has mandated detecting illegal..?

Swamp

Hey Swamp,

This is from an email exchange last June with Indian Harbour Beach Official City Person (aka Fun Prohibition Orificer) -

"The code that prohibits digging applies to all the parks, including beach parks. This code is not enforceable for the areas north or south of the beach parks." (yeah, only because Brevard County owns that real estate).

 

Me-"So you can't dig in the sand on the beach at one of your city parks?"

Fun-Prohibition Orificer- 

"Thank you Ms. Young!

 The City Code adopted in 1980 states that any excavation on the premises of a park is prohibited.  Therefore,  digging in the sand for buried treasures is a technical violation of this code.  However, is the city going to go patrol the beach and cite a family digging in the sand, making sand castles, or digging to cover up a patron in the sand? No, an officer will utilize his or her discretion.  However, if a park patron is digging near the dunes or a sea turtle nest I am confident the officer utilize this code to protect the environment, the dunes, and the park."

 

Thankfully, most of the beaches are owned by Brevard county.  I politely told them I would be voting against the city of IHB acquiring any more beachfront.  My original question didn't even concern the beach parks.  Imagine my surprise when they told me "don't even think about it in ANY of our parks!"

Yeah. I left my real last name on it.  Like you can't type MedStock Photos into Google and find out who I am, where I live, and what I had for breakfast.

Glad ya'll made it through Irma.  I hope we're done with hurricanes this year.

Sherry

 PS.  I think they are full of shite about having jurisdiction over beach sand.  The state of Florida owns all beaches up to the high tide line.

 

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4 hours ago, tvanwho said:

Just wondering why we are not hearing of Spanish gold doubloons and such being recovered on Florida beaches with these hurricanes stirring things up?

Entire book chapters could be written on this subject, so using the Spanish treasure fleet that went down during a hurricane in 1715 (and partially more specifically a ship just south of what is now Wabasso, FL) here's the long-and-short of it:

What recovery efforts between the years 1716 - 1722 were unable to salvage now for the most part resides in one of two places: a) Already on shore buried within the dunes, and/or, b) Just off shore on average anywhere from 30 feet to 1,000 yards due to ship interaction with reefs..

Because gold is heavy, what has been recovered from the water in recent times was found on average five feet to eight feet beneath the sea bed.. Due to this, the vast majority of gold coinage found on beaches following storms hasn't been "tossed on shore," it has washed out of dunes..

As for why you don't hear about it, I think that goes without saying..

Swamp
 

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I'd just like to add two words to what Swamp said, if I may. 

Renourishment Sand. 

Anything that washes out of the dunes sinks halfway to China in a matter of hours, if not minutes, in that stuff.  Especially with the big waves and high tides we've been having since the hurricanes.

 

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