Forget the big stuff

I find a lot of small gold and I like it, because I know if I can find small gold I can certainly find any big gold tickets in the same search area. 
My typical beach and water hunting style is to cover a small area and cover it really well.
Employing a slow metal detecting pace and using a slow sweep speed as I clean an area out. 
I often detect stud ear ring backs and gold chains without pendants,  two very difficult to detect items of jewelry using a metal detector at the beach.
That is what happens when you "Mole" around winkling out targets in a small area, instead of briskly walking miles along the wet sand swinging your metal detector.
Im the guy you see when you first walk onto the beach and Im the guy you pass not far off the same place as you walk off the beach.
So much of metal detecting is exactly how it sounds, detecting metal. 
It really helps if you give your metal detector a chance to detect metal, by walking and sweeping your search coil slowly and having a level search coil as close to the sand as possible.
You are highly unlikely to detect a gold chain without a pendant or a thin gold ladies band with a huge rock in it, if you move across the beach too quickly and swing a tilted search coil. 
A metal detector needs time to detect metal and relay that information back through your headphones or speaker.
The better you detect metal the more target information your receive, especially if you use a metal detector with a screen.
You can detect metal better, by slowly passing your search coil over it and listening to the audio responses through your headphones or speaker.
Sometimes an iffy signal that was barely detected, can become a good signal and a nice recovery after you have swept your search coil slowly over a target from different directions.
Basic stuff, but basics are the foundations you build on to become a good beach hunter. 
Beach hunters have to detect targets in a saltwater matrix, targets that could be settled at any angle and depth, so you want to give yourself the best chance of detecting them by helping your metal detector do the thing you bought it to do.
Sure you could run around the beach like your on a competition hunt searching for buried tokens, but if you want to find nice tickets like this $13.000.00 ring with a 1.9 carat diamond, you need to go into full "Mole" mode.

The afternoon I found this bobby dazzler, I probably covered a 500 feet of high tide line on my two hour beach hunt.  
Detecting and digging targets, why would I want to cover the rest of the beach when Im detecting targets.
Searching slow and low helps you detect targets, it also saves you from having to cover the whole beach. 
Forget the big stuff that is easy to detect at the beach, go for the stuff 90% of people using a metal detector at the beach are not going to detect.