Monday, November 21, 2016

Planning for a successful jewelry hunt

So much of beach jewelry hunting is about planning and having the right search strategy, knowing before you go to you give yourself the best shot at recovering jewelry.
Although I only had a four hour jewelry hunt this weekend, I made sure the jewelry hunting scales were tipped in my favor by planning ahead of the trip to the beach.
The three following things were the main reasons I went over the 20 ounce gold jewelry mark for 2016, working on a hunch using the right search techniques and equipment for the task.

1. Recon 

The beach I chose to search, was spotted the previous week and looked promising. 
I actually spent the last fifteen minutes of a previous jewelry hunt testing the area.
The high amount of quarters and nickels in the area told me the place had not been searched for a while, so I eagerly awaited returning to the site.
I had a back up site ready, but it was not needed as this site was still ready for cherry picking.
Recon and trying a site on a hunch often works if you can break the habit of going to the same jewelry hunting sites every week. 

2. Search strategy 

If the site was still loaded with clad coins, I planned to cherry pick the low and really high tones with one of my favorite VLF metal detectors. 
By having a selective target recovery plan, I could cover the area trying to pick out the obvious gold or silver targets.
Instead of wasting time digging clad coins and junk targets, I intended to use my experience to go for gold.
Sure, I could miss a good target being masked by a larger target, but hey I found four gold and seven pieces of silver jewelry. 
I prefer to go for what I can detect in my allotted metal detecting time, and not worry about what I may be leaving behind. 
I only had four hours to hunt this weekend so I maximized my jewelry hunting time to try bring home my share of jewelry, which turned out to be three gold rings, one platinum and 18K band, three silver rings and two silver bracelets. 

3. Horses for courses 

Using a metal detector with good audio responses to the stuff you are searching for makes perfect jewelry hunting sense.
The majority of gold jewelry responds with a low tone on my Minelab CTX 3030, silver has a high tone, the same tones I am used to on my Minelab Excalibur and Sovereign.  
After years of using my favorite metal detectors I can hear the differences between common beach found clad coins and gold or silver rings, heck I can even tell the difference between an aluminum pull tab and a gold ring.
In horse racing lingo, I choose the horse for the course by using the equipment that is going to detect the stuff I am searching for.
Here is a link to a video, explaining the way I set up one of the metal detectors I use for "Cherry picking" gold and silver jewelry at the beach. 


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