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The Law Of Averages


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I don't know exactly why but I started saving pull tabs about a year ago. 

deutran- I believe it brother.... way out in the bush going miles without even getting a signal...my mind would drift off thinking of whatever...kinda like when I used to be a house painter. 

strick

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16 hours ago, Mark Gillespie said:

Several years ago I counted the pull tabs dug compared to the gold rings and the number was around 100 to 1. 

You are extremely fortunate, Mark.. Around here I'd say it's easily over 500 to 1 (including bottle caps) for silver anything much less gold rings, which is in the four-figure ratio, possibly beginning with a " 2 "..

One would think especially on the beaches Au would be popping all the time.. But it hasn't been, especially in recent years.. Closest beaches to me are what I call "working man" beaches.. Tungsten and the like far outweigh gold rings these days, and junk jewelry far outweighs silver..

Swamp

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I must add one more bit of information, all the gold rings I've dug gave an ID of nickel or below.  Only two rings have read pull tab and up.  Interesting is the fact that most of the gold rings in the world belong to women and most are thinner and will read from the upper end of tinfoil to around nickel. 

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11 hours ago, Mark Gillespie said:

I must add one more bit of information, all the gold rings I've dug gave an ID of nickel or below.  Only two rings have read pull tab and up.  Interesting is the fact that most of the gold rings in the world belong to women and most are thinner and will read from the upper end of tinfoil to around nickel. 

Yep dig those low tones. Most that I have found are below 12.14 on the ctx with my eyebrow raiser/sweet spot areas being in the 12.03 to 12.08 .... However now I'm paying lots of attention to the rotten zinc penny that read from 12.30 and down..... which may lead to the death of me lol...  

SECRET with the CTX if I get a good hit with anything below 12.30 and it shows up as a nice red blob on the target trace..then it gets dug. Rotten deep zinc pennies and very old deep pull tabs often give a weak target trace. 

strick

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This ugly one hit at 46 VDI ..... 415 grain of 10k

 

Screen Shot 2017-07-20 at 7.04.44 AM.png

Screen Shot 2017-07-20 at 7.18.34 AM.png

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On 7/19/2017 at 0:43 PM, Swampstomper Al said:

You are extremely fortunate, Mark.. Around here I'd say it's easily over 500 to 1 (including bottle caps) for silver anything much less gold rings, which is in the four-figure ratio, possibly beginning with a " 2 "..

One would think especially on the beaches Au would be popping all the time.. But it hasn't been, especially in recent years.. Closest beaches to me are what I call "working man" beaches.. Tungsten and the like far outweigh gold rings these days, and junk jewelry far outweighs silver..

Swamp

I'm about to conclude that nobody ever drops anything on our beaches except pull tabs and bottle caps.  I flew home on Tuesday and yesterday I was ready to hit the sand after a week in Tennessee.  5 hours and three beaches yesterday around Melbourne.  My fantastic haul consisted of :12 cents, 1 costume earring, a piece of a junk chain bracelet, 8 pull tabs, 6 bottle caps, one tent stake, and one small chunk of melted aluminum.  On the plus side, my new Infinium shaft is a big improvement on the stock one, that chain piece was about 6 inches down in wet sand (:ohmy:), and I probably worked off about 2 bites of one of those slices of mom's pecan pie that I shamelessly indulged in last week.

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Unfortunately gold depletes. Nugget hunters face the fact that every nugget dug from a patch depletes it until the gold is gone. It never comes back.

I used to think "that's fine, I will just switch entirely to jewelry detecting some day since jewelry is constantly being lost. The beach will never run out of gold."

I have come to realize however that any virgin park or beach of age has 100 years or more accumulation of jewelry. Very similar to silver, these "old jewelry" finds provide the bulk of the jewelry these locations give up. However, the rate of "fresh drops" or newly lost jewelry is quite slow, and due to constant detecting these days comes nowhere close to replenishing the jewelry.

I think what we are all experiencing is initial enriched old jewelry getting cleaned out, leaving nothing left to find but new finds which are very sparse.

The rate of loss must vary for jewelry by site depending on many factors. I am just making this up, but imagine a 100 year old beach where one gold ring is lost each year. 100 rings to find. The first people in have great success because of the old ring accumulation. As that old gold depletes however, there is only one new ring per year to replace it. Eventually you get to where everyone is fighting to be the first to find that one ring.

Therefore while jewelry does replenish, it is quite likely that it will get increasingly difficult to make good finds, and we are seeing that result already. This is compounded by the trend to junk jewelry as young people would rather invest in a new iPhone than a quality gold or platinum ring.

Cherish those quality jewelry finds. They will never cease entirely but I do think that just like we are seeing nugget detecting, the "golden age" of jewelry detecting is largely behind us. I am not trying to be a bummer about that, just trying to explain what I am personally experiencing and hearing from others over the last 20 years.

With all that said, ring pull tabs are good! They are an indicator old gold remains to be found. If a location is cleaned out of pull tabs, the likelihood is the old gold is gone also.

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