Different ways of recovering good stuff at the beach

If your into finding cool stuff at the beach, you can sometimes recover good stuff without using a metal detector.

I sometimes use some pretty different or unconventional ways of recovering buried jewelry, coins or artifacts at the beach.

Including, trenching, sifting sand, magnet fishing, dredging and fanning. 

Some of these techniques beach hunters use all the time while scooping, digging or recovering targets.

Trenching, sifting and magnet fishing can be very effective when used more often during the course of a beach hunt.
Dredging is obviously a little different and very site specific, as you cannot simply start dredging for jewelry and coins at a busy tourist beach, or do I? 

Some of the ways you can use trenching, sifting and magnet fishing at the beach while metal detecting are quite simple and effective. 

For example, if you recover several good targets in one area, try scooping or scraping away the top sand from the productive area instead of just walking away from the area, as most beach hunters would when no targets are detectable. 

If you remove a foot of sand from an area, you may detect deeper targets in the area.
That is how I recovered these cool old finds at a beach that used to have an 1830s Florida Seminole indian wars camp in the area.

In older areas with a chance of recovering old coins or artifacts, I often dump the removed sand through a home made screen or sifter.  

It's surprising what you can find sifting sand at old beach sites, no wonder it is Archeologists preferred method of screening material. 

Fanning sand off rocks in shallow water close to shore is easier than scooping targets. 

I often use a waterproof pin-pointer to help me locate jewelry and coins in pockets or holes in coral and rocks. 

A magnet in a scoop basket helps you to recover small nuisance pieces of iron while scooping, but I often use a more powerful magnet searching for large iron artifacts. 

I cast the magnet attached to a rope into rivers or marshy areas searching for old weapons or large clumps of iron, that may have more valuable objects fused onto or inside the clumps of iron.

All of these techniques are just an expansion of every day things beach hunters do.

On the last episode of the Travel channel show "Expedition Unknown" I was using a dredge in an icy cold river in England, searching for coins and artifacts from the time of King John.

Another show will air on TV this year where I am using a very different method of searching for and recovering old stuff.  

After all is said and done, aren't we as beach hunters just trying to move sand, shells, rock or iron to get to good stuff?