A textbook spot on the beach , almost.

Got in about four hours on Cocoa yesterday. Now the beaches have been pretty iffy for a long time being very sanded in. Sandy did stir things up a bit.

After 30 minutes of looking around the reformed slope finding junk I hit my first quarter. In a long shallow depression about 50% of the distance between high and low tide lines. Then along that one and the next depression, a total of about 100', it was like a scene from Toms beach DVD. The quarters where in a straight line, the dimes above that by about 6' and a single nickel in between with a random penny thrown in for kicks above it all. Even more interesting was the spacing along the line looking back down the straight line was almost even for both the quarters and dimes.

Conditions were perfect. About two inches of fine sand over a dense broken shell/coarse grain layer with all the coins right on top of the dense layer in the depressions. Zilch on the rise in between. Once I cleaned up this area never found another one but it was fun while it lasted!

Only down side was not one piece of jewelry was found and our group had 4 detectors working various parts of the beach!

One of the other guys was working closer to the low tide waterline and got lots of pennies at the edge of the surf.

Many of the dimes and a few of the quarters had seen some serious grinding from sand action and a few dimes were pretty thin.

Despite no jewelry or treasure coins it was still a beautiful day with mild breeze, low 70's, a beautiful wife and good friends. Days like this are one of the reasons I love this hobby!

Congrats, sounds like a great day!

Eric....... sounds like an inverted trough if the dimes were in a sratification line above the quarters. Storms can easily do that. Any lead sinkers?

Beach hunting with wave action is an art in itself being they change from day to day....Indeed the weight of the targets usually follow a line and lets hope for a line of gold rings the next time around...

That was another one that was interesting, none of us found a single sinker anywhere on the beach! I figured it had to be set up by the storm but I also was hoping for a little jewelry of even sinkers for the lead scrap can.

It looks like the beach is sort of reorganizing it'self again down that way. The flat back beach is coming back and the slope is reforming since I was there a few days after Sandy went by. Is that what you've been seeing?

Was on Daytona yesterday and found it back to its' usual long gentle slope. Found a few short coin lines where the quarters were right in the surf line at low tide with a nickel line about four feet above that. Dimes and pennies were sort of scattered around. Again no sinkers, not even beside the pier where you usually get several. I only found a hoop earing and a broken plated necklace higher up the beach for jewelry. My hunting partner nailed it with a small platinum and diamond ring on the low ride surf line. Wish I'd got my coil over that one but I'm glad for him! His first platinum after years of hunting. For Daytona we found surprisingly little trash and what there was was pretty deep. The usual can pieces and washers. Only hit two pull tabs the whole day. The beach is definately a little different right now.

Sailorman just curious what machine are you using?

On the dry sand to shallow water I use an Etrac with a 13" Ultimate coil. Wading I have an AT-Pro. Wishing for a CZ-21 one day! My hunting partner was running a Sovereign with a WOT coil.

Ive never had the chance to use my Etrac on a salt beach, always wondered how the FBS perform. I wish I would have brought it instead of my Excal II which performed very poorly.
Do you keep the box covered from salt air?

Surprised the Excal didn't perform, they are probably the most popular detector I've seen in the surf down here! The Etrac does very well in the dry sand, I've dug a matchbox monster truck at a measured 18" in dry sand using pinpoint mode. Open screen wouldn't even pick it up but PP did.

In the wet sand I still seem to get down a solid 10" and sometimes a touch more on quarters and about the same in the water. Where the BBS seems to trump FBS is on smaller gold rings, especially in the wet. Runs deeper in the wet as well usually. But since I don't have an Excal or CZ-21 right now I use what I got!!!

I do wrap the ETrac in Camo Gun Wrap to keep the sand and salt spray away from the control box vents. It's also good for dirty hunts to keep your machine clean. Have a good supplier for it. Only clings to itself and leaves no residue. This is my ETrac in beach attire:



Sorry for the poor image, cell phone camera.

Got me these as well on the beach a little while back.

Yes, I was surprised at the performance or rather lack of from the EXCAL II. I was hardly finding anything on cocoa beach last spring so ran a depth test and it had barely picked up a quarter @ 8" in moist salt sand. That was the first time I had brought it in the salt. Upnorth in fresh water, it worked great as I hit a buffalo nickel @ 10", no problem, a small 10kt ring at 8". I sent it back to MineLab and it tested fine. Pretty disappointing.

Wow, strange!

I forgot to mention it only just barely picked that quarter up in pinpoint too...!

Man, that ain't right. Makes one wonder what caused it. In PP especially that unit should have run deeper. Wonder about things like EMI, black sand (although I've never seen much at Cocoa), rust chips (but they're usually big enough to show up as targets), moon phase, ufo's, forgotten lucky shoes......

Hope you have better luck next time!

yall stay away from cocoa beach area, tom allready hunted it out and cherry picked all the gold!!!!!!!!!!!
chuck.

I Ebayed that thing and it's workin great for the buyer, somewhere on the west coast....go figure..



Chuck, this time of the year is relic season for Tom...unless another storm blows through



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/13/2012 03:20AM by Aaron.

sailorman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Surprised the Excal didn't perform, they are
> probably the most popular detector I've seen in
> the surf down here! The Etrac does very well in
> the dry sand, I've dug a matchbox monster truck at
> a measured 18" in dry sand using pinpoint mode.
> Open screen wouldn't even pick it up but PP did.
>
> In the wet sand I still seem to get down a solid
> 10" and sometimes a touch more on quarters and
> about the same in the water. Where the BBS seems
> to trump FBS is on smaller gold rings, especially
> in the wet. Runs deeper in the wet as well
> usually. But since I don't have an Excal or CZ-21
> right now I use what I got!!!
>

It took a while to learn how to detect very low conductive small gold jewelry on the beach. Most of the very low conductive small gold jewelry that I’ve detected have been in the wet sand, while the tide was going out.

Back in February of this year, posted quite a few gold jewelry numbers for the E-trac on a different forum. Perhaps re-posting it here could help E-trac users locate more small gold jewelry.

Titled “Over 90 gold jewelry numbers for the E-trac”

Detecting since Feb, 2010
E-trac with 18"x15" SEF, 13" Ultimate coil, Pro coil, Minelab 8" coil, 4.5"x7" SEF, Sunray target probe
CTX3030 with 17"x13" DD coil, 11" DD coil

Digs_alot. You're right! One thing I've learned with the Etrac on the beach is dig FE 12. Sure you get some pull tabs but anywhere along that line the goods can show up! If the tone is smooth and consistent I'll also dig any 11 or 13. I usually hunt either in Pinpoint or open screen and if the trash isn't real high and it's better then 27 FE and I don't lose it lifting the coil I'll probably dig it anyways......you just never know!