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Thursday, October 23, 2014

Beach hunting at night

I love using my metal detector in the dark, especially when I am searching for jewelry on tourist beaches. 
That may explain why I am rarely seen by other beach hunters, I am usually walking off a beach with gold when people are showing up to detect at first light. 
I prefer to use my Minelab CTX 3030 when "Cherry picking" for gold or silver jewelry at night. 
There are many advantages to beach hunting at night,  including the following:

You are far less likely to be approached by people asking what you are looking for, or what are you doing when you detect on the beach at night.
When you have a few good finds to your name, you attract less attention from other beach hunters, helping to keep your favorite sites a secret. 
Not being seen too many times at the same site will help keep you out of other beach hunters conversations. 
You may find you are the only person searching the beach on a night time low tide, if the beach is cut or eroded beach, you have a prime beach hunting situation to yourself.   
Metal detecting on the beach at night, your competition is automatically cut in half on tourist beaches, as very few local water hunters are on the beach at night, they will be in bed!
The productive high tide line is all yours at night,  yes thats not a typo, the productive high tide line.  Chains, sunglasses, dollar bills, wash ashore at high tide, just begging to be picked up by an enterprising beach hunter who has the beach all to themselves at night. 

These are just a few of the reasons I like to beach hunt at night, or a few hours before sunrise. 
With the high number of newbie water hunters, and the die hard "Its all in the water" guys, metal detecting on the beach at night has never been so attractive. 
Use a discrimination search mode on trashy tourist beaches, or an all metal search mode and dig all targets on cleaner beaches with fewer trash targets. 
I hardly ever use a head lamp on tourist beaches, there is usually enough city light to see what you are doing,  although a little extra help from a head lamp does help during the final  target recovery process. 
This vintage 18K Cartier diamond and emerald ladies ring is a night beach hunting find from a couple of years ago. 



The ring was one of 50 pieces of gold jewelry I recovered night hunting at an eroded local beach, using the night or pre dawn hours to protect myself from being seen at the productive site. 
I saw no other people searching this beach at night, when mother nature opens this site up again, you can count on me to be metal detecting after hours and yawning most of the following day.  
I could write a book about some of the things I have seen on the beach metal detecting at night, and fill a photo album of bling recovered while the competition are tucked up in bed.  






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