Beach hunting after a major storm

Adam in New Jersey asks how I would go about searching a beach after major erosion has taken place. 

First of all Adam, safety is rule number one in this type of beach hunting situation.  Watch out for metal pipes, wooden posts or other jagged materials sticking out of what remains of the beach.  Also keep an eye out for anything being washed back in the surf that may hit you.

You would be amazed at some of the jagged obstacles sticking out of the sand at eroded beaches.

In my opinion, you should concentrate on recovering the easy to detect targets first using a good VLF metal detector with discrimination.  Why worry about target depth when you are searching a beach that may have several feet of sand missing. 

You only have a short window of opportunity, before the following tides begin to bring sand back in over an area covering it up.

Beaches are often littered with iron and all sorts of junk after a major storm strips sand from a beach. 

I go for the shallow easy to detect treasure between the trash in my first attempt at searching an eroded beach.

Coins, jewelry or artifacts that came out of the sand, on following searches I go after stuff that may still be trapped in deeper layers of sand.

Using an all metal search mode and removing all metal targets.

Major tourist beaches in the New Jersey area are heavily hunted, so no doubt all the shallow surface finds will be removed quickly after a couple of days. You can use the competition to your advantage when you start searching for all metal targets.  

The shallow clad coins and junk should be gone, it may be easier using a large search coil on a VLF metal detector or a pulse induction metal detector searching for deep targets.

I would not recommend getting bogged down digging everything from the get go. Double " Cherry picking" has always worked for me in the past. Cherry pick good shallow targets, cherry pick good deep targets.