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Thursday, June 18, 2015

Searching sand bars at tourist beaches

Yesterday I found several pieces of gold and silver jewelry at a local tourist beach that was pretty sanded in. 
The upper beach was too busy to detect, the lower beach was sanded in badly so I hit the best looking spot which turned out to be the water. 
I figured after about a week of 3 to 4 foot waves with people jumping up into the waves,  there had to be a few pieces of jewelry shaken loose. 
The beach I chose to search was my third choice, I walked on and straight off the first two beaches because I did not see any sand bars. 
Unlike many full time beach and water hunters in Florida, I only had a couple of hours to metal detect, so I needed to maximize my chances of recovering jewelry. 
I took my pulse induction SDC 2300 because I knew I was not going to be digging much trash and I like its sensitivity to small gold.  
Around sand bars you are more likely to find rings, chains and ear rings.  
I was only metal detecting in knee deep water, where people would have walked up onto the slope of the sand bar and got hit by waves on the previous high tide. 
This is often a place that is ignored at low tide by water hunters wanting to get out as deep as possible, or beach hunters searching in a straight line along the lower beach. 
Part of being able to read the beach is knowing what the beach probably looked like on the previous high tide. 
Where would people in the water have been standing or swimming? 
I look at things differently to other beach or water hunters, by always putting all my search efforts into trying to recover jewelry lost on previous high tides. 
I never get carried away by seeing a crowd of people on the beach or in the water and thinking I have to search for jewelry that crowd may have lost. 
In my opinion, you are far more likely to recover jewelry lost in previously crowded areas than stumble across jewelry lost within the last couple of hours. 
The jewelry I recovered yesterday was probably washed over the sand bar recently, it had not sunk out of detection range and my water reading hunch was spot on. 
I have recovered many expensive gold rings on very shallow sand bars,  people love to lay on sand bars  in only a few inches of water.  
Once those hands slide into the sand, the suction of the sand and water can ruin the moment as rings are easily lost on a sand bar. 



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