Best silver day....

3-2-2012, Tennessee got slammed by one wave of severe thunderstorm after thunderstorm, many of which resulting in tornado touchdowns and lots of destruction. We really don't know how bad as of yet; I know of several funnel cloud pics I've seen from friends on Facebook, and a few videos showing some on the ground as well. At any rate, before the storms got here I was on my way home from town and noted I still had my detectors in my back seat. I decided to stop for a minute at an older home site I've been hunting, to see if the CoinStrike could do well for its intended purpose of coin hunting.

I had hunted this home site REALLY hard with the T2 SE, and 5" coil and 11" coil...and even did a video there with the AT Pro digging several wheat cents and such...and I finally wrapped it up with the eTrac.

Well the CoinStrike was a little wild here...I had to tame it down some, and still had a little trouble with false signals...I figured out they were iron signals that would give a bleed over, and then once the coil got close to the iron the signal would disappear and it would show negative numbers on the ID. I actually didn't find anything in the yard itself where I had been hunting. But there was a little island of land that I had never hunted...the drive way to this home site does a big loop and the grassy area inside the loop was a spot I had neglected to ever hunt. So I figured it would be a GREAT testing ground between the CoinStrike and eTrac. I hunted it with the C$ first and to my surprise, pulled out a silver dime, and some clad. I got a few of those false signals and marked a few questionable hits that I could get a good high pitch beep from one angle...then turn 90 degrees to it, and not get anything...then 90 degrees to that, and get a good signal again. I marked those for checking the eTrac with later on. After being satisfied that I had covered it pretty well, I broke the eTrac out and put it in Andy's coin disc pattern, two tone conductive, and deep ON, fast OFF, Auto +3.

I kid you not...I no more than turned the machine on, loaded Andy's coin pattern...and took three steps at most, and had a sweet 12-44 signal from every angle I hit it from. Out comes silver dime #2 for the day. Right beside it another signal...out came a wheat cent. So I checked the iffy signals I had marked and they both were deep coins but the eTrac had no trouble getting them. This dirt I was in is NOT the red dirt I commonly encounter...this dirt is a nice rich dark brown color...eTrac wants to run about 21-22 in Auto mode, versus it wanting to run no higher than 19-20 in my relic sites. I was super impressed with the eTrac for its designed purpose of coin hunting. I ended up with another silver dime for a total of 3, and 4 wheaties, the rest were clad. Most all of the clad was found with the CoinStrike...the eTrac found all of the wheat cents, and two of the silver dimes. It didn't false at all. If I had the money to throw around I would just keep the eTrac around for just coin hunting old sites and find something else for relic hunting but I can't do that right now. The silver dimes were not that deep either...one was just 4" deep that I found with the C$ and the other two were about 6". I had to stop hunting once for the first wave of thunderstorms to roll by...no way was I bout to leave a spot that just gave up 3 silvers lol...tornado or not. Actually there was one that touched down out of that thunderstorm cell that was just about 3 miles from where I was...it was a strange ordeal...was light one one side of the sky and dark on the other, and barely rained where I was at.

This was taken by a friend of mine on his cell phone...same tornado I'm talking about above. Evening news said they knew it flattened 5 homes and damaged 14 others, with only slight injuries, but this area has gotten hammered by multiple cells and tornadoes....don't know how many confirmed ones as of yet. Nobody ever said that I had much sense, lol out detecting with tornado producing super cells rumbling through.

Calculated risk?

(((Nice story))).

Nice job on the silver, good story, and yes...yesterday was a major tornado outbreak day...dozens of tornadoes, and -- unfortunately, many injuries and deaths.

Glad you were safe, Daniel.

Steve

Now that is the E-trac I am talking about! Way to go Daniel nice finds. Any day you find silver nowadays is a good day and 3 is a great day in my book. I think even more than depth the thing the E-trac shines at the most is finding silver coins in trash. I have had mine since one month after they came out and have not found a detector as good at that. Now don't get me wrong like I said before when it comes to pure raw depth I love CZ's, But hunting trashy sites iron,pulltabs or steel bottle caps nothing in my area and ground beats an E-trac! As you would say, just for kicks and giggles get a sunray x-8 coil and rehunt it as To me it is almost as deep as the stock pro coil with alot better seperation in trash.

Harold -- If I had the money I would have, but technically this eTrac is already sold. I listed it on eBay and it sold last Sunday BUT the buyer hasn't paid me yet...he says he is waiting on his tax return to come. In my opinion he shouldn't have bought something that he did not have money in hand to buy, but what can I do now that wont kill my 100% feedback rating? eBay has a certain time frame they want you to wait before filing a claim and I hope he has paid me by then or I will have to go that route. Until I get money in hand, I'm using the thing lol. Wont be buying any extra coils for it though. At one time I had the 8" SunRay and 10x12 SEF DD for the eTrac but you gotta keep in mind that I relic hunt most of the time and neither of those excelled the stock 11" DD coil for what I do. I can certainly see the application for coin hunting trashy sites though...even a 5 or 6 inch DD or concentric coil would be a good coil to have around for that. If I were to have kept the eTrac for coin hunting only, I probably would have gone in such a route....just to have for trashy site hunting.

Good story Daniel. I too have found 4-4.5 inch silver that other brands of detectors had been over and the etrac nailed it. I may be wrong but the etrac seems to hit better on "on edge" shallow silver. I keep a constant eye on other forums and just don't see the silver coin quantities with other brands that can keep up with etrac. And a lot of etrac users are new users less than 6 months and they are finding respectable quantites of silver coins. And silver dimes seem to be the silver coin that's found the most on previous hunted spots.

I would venture to say....... those of whom vest that much money into a metal detector (ie ..... the Minelab E) ........ may spend a bit more time hunting; subsequently/possibly leading to finding more volume/quantity.

Went back out there today...my wife was having ferrier work done on her horses, and I decided to hunt the horse pasture adjacent to the homesite I've been finding the coins at.

I dug one and only one signal. A sweet 12 - 42/44 on the eTrac. Stopped me in my tracks. I dug expecting to see a silver Rosie or Merc dime and to my surprise I saw silver..and something round...but not a coin.







I was very happy with that....ferrier work didn't take long and I didn't have long to detect anyway. My only thoughts are this....of the homesites I've hunted, this one has been the most productive for me. I don't know why. I'm not sure if it's because I have a better knowledge of detectors now, compared to the past, or if it's just that the inhabitants of this particular home had more to lose than some of the other ones I've hunted. Nothing this house has been deep...the deepest coin thus far has been maybe 7 inches deep and most coming in at 3-5 inches. Actually in 16+ years of metal detecting, this is only the second home site that I've found silver coins at...and by far the most. If there is a pattern to find from it, it would be this:

The home sites I've found older coins at, are older homes that were lived in up until the last few yrs or so or are currently still lived in. The others ones I've hunted were long gone...just barely standing structures that hadn't been lived in in ages...sometimes just foundations. In almost every case of those, I've not so much as found a coin at them...and if I did it wasn't much and it sure wasn't silver coinage.

When a structure has been removed........... there is (normally) several times more volume of nails in the ground; subsequently, masking is much more prevalent...... masking the majority of non-ferrous items you wish to find.

I can understand that part of it (masking due to removing the house) but I'm referring to home sites that have just been let go from neglect, and have fallen in. Usually they have rusty tin roofs that have fallen flat on top of the foundation of the house. I have hunted several of those kind of home sites and have came home empty handed of coins many times. I usually say if its got a rusty tin roof, I'm not going to find anything there. But if it has old wooden shingles or modern shingles if its still lived in....then I will usually find coins, albeit silver seems scarce around here. I'm not sure what the deal is....maybe those home sites I'm talking about date back to the depression era and pre TVA...where everybody locally didn't have jobs other than farming, and most all of their wealth was just trading their crops for other stuff they needed instead of actually having money.

Hmmmmmm. Wonder if the silver-era coins start at the 8 10" depth range.