Finds while on the road!

[Tom in SWW]

051605: I had to go on the road for a few days, so I took the DFX with me. Once I got where I was going, the best candidate was a local park..
It was late in the day, I didn’t get a chance to detect until after 6 PM. But, I hit it with a vengeance!
I didn’t get more than ten feet from the truck before I started hitting coins. Wherever I went, I found more!
I started towards a playground area, and unearthed what would be the oldest coin of the trip: A 1949-D wheat penny. Not bad for beginners!
Right about that time, my buddy showed up. He wanted to go eat in a bit, so I had but a little more time to collect that night.
All I managed was about another hundred feet or so, and I had to go!
The reward for just under an hour’s worth of collecting was 15 coins. Not bad!

051705: This was a momentous day! The weather held, and due to circumstances, I was essentially done with work for the day at 9:30 in the morning!
By 10:00, I was in place, detecting up a storm!
This place was simply amazing: I’ve never had the privilege before of going to a place and cherry picking!
I started where I left off the night before, and quickly racked up the coin count
The goal was to break my one day record of 48 coins. By the time I broke for Lunch at 1:00, I already had 54 coins! The goal then became to break that magical 100 mark.
The soil in this park consists of a very rich, very rooty grass that goes down about 2-3” typically before it hits large, river rounded gravel.
Essentially all the coins stop when they hit this layer, so coins stay quite close to the surface.
The grass above ground was also typically dense and matted, so that added a couple of inches of space before you came to ground but because they coins stayed close to the surface, that extra distance which reduced detection depth wasn’t a problem.
Indeed, even a large amount of small targets like dimes were recovered!
Areas away from the street and back towards the parking lots tended to have larger amounts of older coinage.
Intelligence started to come in: The park is the scene of a three day long Fourth of July celebration every year, becoming the focal point of the community. This has taken place for at least 50 years.
There are vendors and events all over the park, and folks stand “elbow to elbow”, so there is ample traffic through the area, and lots of opportunity to lose coins and jewelry.
One of the service clubs also has an event where they throw handfuls of coins into a hay pile, and the kids scramble to find them all.
After Lunch, I dove in again. I was using the Bigfoot earlier, and wanted to see if the 950 coil made a difference.
The 950 ran hot with the same high performance program I was using earlier and caused me to slow down to check out too many questionable signals and recovery rates dropped, so I wound up going back to the Bigfoot after an hour or so.
Also had to take a quick break to deal with a couple of work issues, then it was back to detecting.
The weather was overcast and fairly cool, and occasionally it rained but not enough to quit detecting. It would stop, and I’d dry out for a while, then it would rain again.
I finally threw in the towel about 7 PM after a couple of tour busses filled with kids pulled into the park. I was getting wet, the weather was getting worse,and it was the perfect time to get a bite to eat and count coins.
The afternoon’s total was 70-1/2 coins (someone cut a 1983 penny in half ), so the total for the day was 124-1/2 coins! Not bad at all! Still no silver, though, in spite of the presence of a good percentage (12.2%) of silver era pennies.

The next day was a wash, literally: I was done by 10:30 AM, but with the heavy rain, it wasn’t worth sticking around, so I called it quits and headed for home.

Total for the park over a 24 hour period came to 138-1/2 coins, value of $3.85 plus one 1958 Canadian penny. Best coins: Five “S” mint pennies. Best non-coin find: A child’s aluminum ring. It was so ugly I wonder if a parent “helped” it to get lost…

Pennies: 115
Nickels: 1
Dimes: 19
Quarters: 3
Foreign coins: 1 Canadian penny, 1958


This would be a killer site to go back to, as I only managed to sweep about a third of it.
There are baseball fields and other sites close by as well.

HH! -Tom

[robzombie852]

nice day you had there. too bad no silver. youll get it though.

[Gregory]

Enjoyed reading about your trip Tom, Coins everywhere

[PAPPY]

GREAT STORY TOM AND GOOD FINDS...ENJOYED READING IT...PAPPY

[Loadmaster]

Nice story, Tom. Enjoyed it alot. And 138-1/2 coins will certainly help increase your total coin finds for this year and its early in the season yet!! Keep up the good work (fun).......

Loadmaster (Ed)

[Tom in SWW]

Hi Folks!

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you all enjoyed the story.
I have a picture of the pile of coins, but couldn't post it.
Kept on getting a message about not being able to host the pic from a foreign server (??? I'm in WA state, use MSN????).
Anyone know what I'm doing wrong, or can help?
Many thanks & HH!

-Tom