Bad luck, bad search technique or bad settings ?

I was chatting to a detecting friend a few days ago about heavily hunted beaches and how some people struggle to detect gold rings at the beach.
My friend pointed out that a couple of retired guys hit the same popular beach every day and how he was unlikely to find anything because the beach was heavily hunted.
I pointed out that several of the guys who hit that beach on a daily basis post on detecting forums. 
Photos of the beach and photos of junk and silver jewelry, but hardly any gold which raises a red flag to me.
Having seen the junk and silver jewelry posted, I told my friend that it is quite obvious why they are not finding gold and it is not bad luck.
If you are regularly searching a tourist beach and only finding silver or junk jewelry, you need to look at your search technique and metal detector settings. 
Anyone can detect silver or junk jewelry, but not everyone can detect gold jewelry.
You have to use the correct search techniques and tune your metal detector to give yourself a chance of detecting gold jewelry. 
Walk too quickly and you walk straight over gold, sweep too fast or too high and you miss gold.
Have your metal detector sensitivity level set too high and you fail to hear gold jewelry between the false signals, too high a discrimination setting and you notch out gold jewelry.
I dare say there is gold on any tourist beach in the world, and no matter how heavily hunted the beach is the majority of searchers are using bad search techniques or they have their metal detector controls incorrectly set up. 
That gives you a very good chance of detecting gold, if you spend time improving your search technique and set your metal detector controls up correctly.
I rarely rely on luck, I would rather rely on my search techniques and trusting the metal detector I use.
Good search techniques and a fine tuned metal detector are a killer beach or water hunting combination.
Let the average beach hunters clean the beach of junk and silver jewelry,  go for the often smaller more valuable jewelry with sparkly diamonds by working on search technique and actually testing to see what responses you get from gold jewelry test targets at the beach. 
Heres what Im talking about,  a bobby dazzler diamond engagement ring found last year before sunrise at a heavily hunted south Florida beach.  

With good search techniques and a hot metal detector you can make your own luck.