Sizing up the competition

As any Florida beach or water hunter will tell you, there are not many beaches you can go to now and not see other people metal detecting.
Rick in south Carolina asked me an interesting question, do I take notice of any other people metal detecting in an area.
My answer is no, because I am too busy doing my thing and most of the people I see are people who do the same thing at the same places.
I may not see them very often as I rotate my sites and try new places, but I pretty much know who the local hunters are by sight and newbies are easy to spot.
On my 4th of july beach hunt I saw two novice water hunters, shiny new metal detectors, full wet suits, dive hoods, masks, gloves, extended snorkels and meandering around from the dry sand, to water, to wet sand and all points in between. 
Did I say it was 90 degrees yesterday lol like I said I do not take much notice of the so called competition when I am metal detecting.
If anything I prefer to avoid making contact with other people metal detecting at the beach, as Im not into lolly gagging about who is finding what and where, Im there to find jewelry or coins. 
I would say most people are easy to size up from a distance, by the way they are covering the ground and using their equipment.
Heck at heavily hunted sites I will even pretend to not know what Im doing close to other people searching the same site.
I still believe the only real competition you have at the beach is yourself, especially if you look at the big picture which I often do.
The next time you go to the beach and turn on your metal detector, look at how small your search coil is and how much time you have to metal detect in and how much ground you have to cover.
There is no way you are going to detect every metal object within detection range at the beach, you are going to miss stuff.
The more of the beach you try to cover, the more targets you are going to miss. 
Even a small beach would take a long time to cover correctly if you kept a very tight search pattern, its even more difficult to keep a tight search pattern when you are water hunting.
Look at the big beach or water hunting picture and you will see how pointless it is to give any thought to sizing up the competition.