What's The Best Advice You Can Give A New Beach Detectorist To Find Good Targets?

[blackjack]

8 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Hey Gary,

It appears to me from your posts you are very eager to instantly become a successful beach hunter, almost like you want to do it as a profession.

I pray that is not the case. 🙂 If you're looking for the magic settings that will get you gold from the get-go you will be disappointed to know that no one can give you that information for a few reasons. The most important factors are Location, Tides, Time of year in some places as there may be no one at the beach during the cold months, Sanded in or out, and the existence/lack of conductive sand like black sand. There is a lot more than that.

First, no one knows your general location. Every single strip of beach in the world is going to be different. Even going a hundred feet can change things. Sometimes 10 feet.

Second, wind, waves and tides vary as well, if you show up at a beach at high tide your hunting strategy is different than at low tide, and different at all the variations time of day throws at you.

If you live in a colder climate you can pretty much count on your local beach having nothing but junk due to being hunted out in the warmer months. Other more experienced detectorists will certainly leave junk for you!

Sanded in or out means that a storm or wind conditions either moved the sand in or out, sanded in is difficult because most good targets will be deeper under the sand. When you are lucky enough to find a beach that has been eroded, what will be there is only the result of what others have not found.

One good thing is that beaches are replenished yearly, relic sites are pretty much done when done. No ghost from 1790 is gonna drop another coin or ring for ya. 😏

I really, really hope you are coming at detecting as a hobby, not a profession. You may get lucky your first time out but more likely until you master your machine, learn the seasonal patterns, and become familiar with conditions of all types, you're pretty much going to come home with junk jewelry, bottle caps, tent stakes, can slaw, foil bottle seals, beer cans and pull tabs. If the best detectorists don't post their trash they make it look easy, but even they get that stuff, and sometimes that's all they get. Seriously. The best, most expensive detector in the world will not find any more than the cheapest one if you don't get your coil over something good.

My first suggestion to you is to lower your expectations.

Next, yes, ask questions here, but get some reading material regarding beach hunting either online or in print. You need to know where to look on a beach as much as you know what to look for. Keep in mind that the most experienced people here are not going to answer you if you don't ask questions that seem to be backed up by experience.

Next, set your detector up in a default configuration, Beach 1 for dry sand, Beach 2 for wet and submerged. Tweaking settings at this early a stage is confusing. Luckily your 800 can be reset with a push of a button. If you don't system reset now and again you can really mess yourself up.

Next, go to your beaches and dig it all. After a while you'll assimilate experience as to what is good to dig and what is not, and still you'll find you're wrong. 😀 As I've told you I didn't find gold for a long time. All the above is the reason, and more, but I relic hunt more than beach hunt.

Rinse your stuff off at the end of the day, and repeat. 🙂 Take care of your equipment and it will take care of you.

It has become painfully apparent to me after over 2 years of detecting that no one jumps in hot and finds really great stuff, because I didn't have high expectations, it's always been a blast. I also don't do it for income.

Good luck as always. 🍀

You've got it covered, that is the 'book' on beach hunting.

[F350Platinum]

1 hour ago, blackjack said:

You've got it covered, that is the 'book' on beach hunting.

Thanks! And I'm "reading" it myself 🤣

I kinda did it as a test to see what I've learned so far. 🤔 Gary's a nice guy. 👍

[schoolofhardNox]

My advice is just the same as others have said. Dig it all for a while, and learn what good targets sounded like and what a bad target sounds like. Once you have that down you will inevitably, one day decide to dig a bad target and it may turn out to be a good one 😄 That's how it works sometimes. No guarantees by using the numbers or tones, although tones work the best overall. A bad target (iron) close or next to a good target (coin) will make that coin sound worse, and make most people pass at digging it. But my main advice is to know the limitations and strengths of the detector you are using. If you have a single frequency machine, you will be limited to dry sand. Wet sand will make your machine so unstable, that you will be frustrated. I use 2 or 3 different machines depending on where I hunt, how sanded in a beach is or how much black sand I encounter. Look over peoples beach posts on all the different sections here to get an idea of which machines perform best, but also meets your price range. Two ways to hunt. Grid a promising looking area to death, or move quicker and cover more ground. Each way has it's pluses and minuses. You will determine your style and comfort of hunting. Good luck. I'm not sure if I read what part of the country you are in?

[mn90403]

On 1/18/2023 at 12:40 AM, Off Grid said:

It's an enduring mystery to me why anyone in their right mind would take jewelry to the beach in the first place.

If you can't show it at the beach, where are you going to SHOW IT?  A good looking body needs some sparkle.

[mn90403]

On 1/17/2023 at 7:58 PM, Gary985112 said:

Hi Everyone,

What is the best advice/tips that you can give to a beach detectorist to find jewelry or other valuable targets? Just curious because I know that years of experience beats all in most cases.

Have a great day!

Go often.

[Northeast]

4 hours ago, mn90403 said:

A good looking body needs some sparkle.

Hence why I don't wear jewellery at the beach!!  🤣

[cuniagau]

Back in the 1990's an old detectorist from the club pulled me aside one night at the club meeting and said, "There are two things I want you to remember, One is that it's a numbers game.  You dig a thousand pull tabs (beavertails in that time period) and you get a gold ring, you dig two thousand pull tabs, and you get two gold rings-a numbers game.  And number Two is, If you are digging nickels, you ain't missing much gold."

Sage advice that I have always remembered.  He hunted at that time with a Fisher CZ 5.  The CZs in the beginning, were analog with a needle and different zones on the dial.  On the faceplate on the CZs in one of the zones was 5 cents, a gold ring and a pull tab grouped together and were assigned the same tone.  If you are digging nickels, you ain't missing much gold!!!  And it is a numbers game.  

That advice has served me well over the years and I have passed it on many times since.  All of the above advice given will serve you well.  Little nuggets of information taken from each response if remembered, will help you become a successful detectorist.  

Re-read all the posts on this thread. Re-read it again.  And now go back and re-read it again.  Knowledge is paramount to being successful, but you have to make it second nature.  Now go back and re-read each response.  

 

[mn90403]

3 hours ago, Northeast said:

Hence why I don't wear jewellery at the beach!!  🤣

Don't let him fool you fellas.  He's an impressive sight.

[bklein]

8 hours ago, mn90403 said:

If you can't show it at the beach, where are you going to SHOW IT?  A good looking body needs some sparkle.

Last year I saw a guy at Montage with the biggest gold necklace I’ve ever seen. Bigger than Mr. T’s. He actually saw me and called me over to see it. Gave me some hope but I am walking 4-6 miles in hunts and not finding anything. It all comes down to picking the right place at the right day and I’m stuck on an every other weekend kind of routine.  And I won’t hunt in the dark or crappy weather.

[GB_Amateur]

3 hours ago, cuniagau said:

If you are digging nickels, you ain't missing much gold!!!

(Please note I'm not contradicting anything said but rather enhancing it.  Some things have change in the past 30+ years.  Obviously all of what I say below is common knowledge among experienced detectorists but this thread was started by someone not in that group and it's worth pointing out, IMO.)

I'm stepping in here because the above piece of advice needs to be taken in context, and can be misinterpreted if that isn't done.  Back when this advice was given I assume detectors didn't have digital target ID's (VDI's).  Did they even have notching capability?  Discrimination (other than the part done by your brain, with tones) was setting a threshold.  Anything with a conductivity below the threshold was silent and thus ignored.  Anything above gave a tone.

A USA 5 cent 'nickel' is pretty low on the conductivity scale.  So are most gold jewelry.  Making sure you picked up nickel meant you weren't rejecting a lot of gold.  Today the story is a bit different and I'm a perfect example of that.  I'll use the popular, widely used, and widely understood Minelab Equinox VDI scale to illustrate:

VDI 0 and below -- ferrous, particularly iron alloy nails.

VDI from 1 to 11 -- aluminum foil zone, no modern coins here, some small jewelry.

VDI 12-13 -- USA nickel coin sweetspot.

VDI 14-18 -- pulltab zone.

VDI 19-21 -- USA zinc cent zone.

VDI 22-23 -- aluminum screw cap zone.

VDI 24 and above -- all other popular USA coins (95% copper cents, clad dimes and quarters, all the 20th Century silver coins except the WWII nickels which are down with their brethren).

I've highlighted the coins in particular, for a reason (more below).  Aluminum can be anywere from 1 to mid 30's depending upon its size and shape.  Jeff McClendon has done an excellent job showing (for multiple detectors with digital readout) where gold jewelry hits -- basically from the foil zone all the way up to the aluminum screwcaps.  (His illustrative posts can be found on this site.  Here's one he did for the new Equinox 900 -19 to 99 scale.  Note the USA nickel coin at 26, the USA zinc cent at 63, and the distribution of gold jewelry (including rings) that start well below the nickel's VDI and go almost to the Zincoln.)

I'm not interested in finding jewelry (although I don't throw back a piece if I do find it 😁).  I definitely want USA nickels and thus dig 12-13 (with some occasional spillover to 11 or 14 if the signal strength indicator says 'weak').  I ignore the foil and pulltab zones.   I find very little gold jewerly.  Why?  Partly because it's rare (as cuniagau's mentor indicated) and partly because I ignore the foil and pulltab zones where most of it resides.  I do get silver jewelry when it falls in the more conductive part of the scale (VDI's 19 and above).

So the modern translation of the wise man from 30+ years ago is to dig all non-ferrous if you want the jewelry.  If you have to notch out a certain VDI region because of a particular kind of annoying trash, you may gain in jewelry per hour but you will miss some -- one of those tradeoffs we detectorists deal with.