Women Of The Hobby -

I've been metal detecting a long time; a little more than 50 -years to date and I have to say, I really like the trend of more women getting into the hobby. Many years ago, you'd see the occasional lady swinging a coil in the dry sand, but it was rare. Women have more developed hearing than men, and that may account for their fairly rapid mastery of metal detecting, or at least the tones, although my wife says "I don't know about THAT,"  after pretty well besting me on various finds throughout the last 7 or 8 years that she has been my metal detecting partner. 

My wife, Patti, detected a 1926 Model-T Ford worm gear

I know quite a few of the women hunters in the Central Florida Metal Detecting Club, and some women who are independent hunters, and most of them are very proficient with their machines. Many take part in the CFMDC SEARCH TEAM which assists local police departments seeking critical evidence at a crime scene, while gaining experience in an aspect of metal detecting few detectorists will ever see.

CFMDC Search Team members Joanne, Nanette, Patti and Carolyn at a police hydration station

I do a monthly presentation at CFMDC meetings we call a "Tech Talk" where we try to present some useful information (a.k.a. News You Can Use) to new members, because new members may be also new to the hobby as well. I've been boring members for going on 3-years or so now, with 10-minute sound bites on search coil selection, proper digging techniques, properly pinpointing a target and what to do if you attract flying saucers with your pulse machine. Stuff like that. One of the most interesting talks I think by far was one that I did not present. I asked two of the experienced lady hunters, Kathy and Patrica, to do a tech talk for the substantial number of women in the club; Kathy on successful beach-hunting scoop techniques for ladies with their less developed upper body strength, and Patrica on use and ground balancing of the Garrett "carrot" pin-pointer. 

Kathy, visible for miles along  the beach, digging a target in the sub-tropical Atlantic beach

Their presentations were awesome. to say the least, and I think it was another affirmation that women have "arrived" in metal detecting, when ladies have enough tenure in the hobby to help other ladies understand the technical aspects and techniques of this sometimes complex hobby. Women seem to listen a little better when owners of lost property talk...we men are action oriented NOW LET'S LIGHT THIS CANDLE AND GO! whereas women seem to be more information oriented...which is weird because in my experience women don't seem to listen at all. Perhaps when gold and jewels enter the conversation, they are more attentive than when listening to me complain about pretty much everything.

One woman detectorist, Tish, created her own metal detecting group, "The Forgotten History Hunters" and friends, gaining permissions by gaining trust of homeowners on historic private properties in Central Florida, and recovering many historic items that would have never seen the light of day again.

Carolyn and Tish of "The Forgotten History Hunters" of Central Florida

Overall, I think it is an amazing trend, with more women becoming involved in the hobby as time goes on. I also like the trend because I don't get in trouble for coming home late while metal detecting anymore...she's right beside me!

LOCALLY HISTORIC FINDS -

Most metal detectorists are big fans of history; older coins, artifacts, and relics are a big thrill to dig! The big draw of these kinds of objects, is that they provide a direct line to the people of the somewhat distant (to us) past here in the United States, going back a few hundred years or so. England and other European locales feature items that go back several hundred to several THOUSAND years! To think another human being in another time and another place saw what you see and touched what you now hold is powerful magic! This is sometimes why a metal detector is sometimes refereed to as a "time machine."

Everything else is hand held now, why not a pocket time-machine?

With a great deal of local, shallow (1" to 15" deep), artifacts being recovered by metal detector users, here in the United States, that means a lot of the past is being returned to the public domain, that is IF users bring the item into the light, and not just marvel at it, toss it in the "finds" box, then head back into the field for more. I would urge everyone who finds what appears to be a unique artifact or relic to take it to your local museum or historic society and see if you can get some info from the folks that deal with historic artifacts on a daily basis. Maybe even loan it to them for a while, as having it sitting on your shelf somewhere puts the item pretty much right back where it was found, out of the light of day again. Your find may even re-write some of the local history; perhaps an unknown colony or fort or railway terminal or countless other things existed there that was not known until your find came back into the light.

Exterior of Florida Indian Pottery Fragment

I've found several artifacts while metal detecting that were NOT metal at all. While digging a deep target under a tree, not far from an old steamboat stop on a Central Florida lake, I hit what I THOUGHT was a piece of rock. I pulled it out of the hole, tossed it aside and continued digging down to a piece of iron so rusted, all that was left was red dirt.

Pottery Shard, Burned Interior

 

I filled in the hole, and grabbed the chunk that came out of the hole and was winding up to throw it into the lake, when I noticed incised marks on the "rock." I turned it over in my hand and saw what looked like a layer of burned material on the opposite side. I suddenly realized it was a piece of Florida Indian pottery! Made by someone who never knew electricity, or automobiles, cellphones, airplanes, television or even imagined them! And I would never have found it, and probably it would never have seen the light of day again had my "time machine" not locked onto a conductive target just below it. It now rests in a museum, where it belongs, for everyone, not just me.

AS SEEN ON TV! - Showing Our Stuff to the World

Our title is probably not familiar to you if you have been born within the last 30-years, or maybe even 40-years. Once upon a time, television was considered the peak of our industrial and technical prowess, and to be seen on black and white television was remarkable indeed. If you managed to get a coveted bleacher audience spot on a local kid's cartoon show, complete with it's own host like "Bozo The Clown" or "Ranger Andy," after the show, you'd be a very minor kid celebrity, getting free packs of candy cigarettes from your admirers at school and the playground. 

The same thing happened with other products advertised on "the tube" in the mid-20th Century...toys, games, clothing, kitchen appliances and so on bore the mark "AS SEEN ON TV!" and even if you had NEVER seen it on TV, it made a real impression on you...it had been scan-lines on a television screen and that made it famous, regardless of whether it worked as advertised, or worked at all. 

Today, we not only have ultra-high definition color TV on everything from our cellphones to a wall-sized screen at home, we all now have our own integrated, digital TV station and motion picture studio in our personal device software, a truly democratized entertainment system that ANYONE can take part in...creating prerecorded video programs or hand-held live-broadcast transmissions, better in quality than some multi-million dollar production companies of only a few years ago!

How does this tie in to metal detecting? Especially here in the United States? Probably one word; YouTube. Maybe two words; YouTube AND Facebook. Where once there were a few metal detecting video producers, and I admit I am still one of them, there are now literally thousands of detectorists showing their finds on their own channels and Facebook pages. I like watching some of them myself, as an interested hunter in my own right, and a lot of those channels have something to add to my knowledge of the hobby. But "promoting" the hobby is probably no longer necessary...any more than the last 100 fishermen surrounding the last shrinking pond on earth needs to be posting "the fun of fishing!" videos to promote fishing! 

My point is, with so many metal detecting enthusiasts posting so many videos of various hunts and digs while digging so many historic artifacts from the ground, this increasingly publicly visible activity has drawn the unwelcome attention of various groups and agencies interested in either curtailing, or eliminating our hobby, plus has them collectively seeking video proof of the metal detecting public's possible careless indifference in recovering and/or handling relics. I'm NOT saying anyone is purposely violating the law or being careless...far from it! But I am saying we are being watched, and at least one international organization, who would be more than happy to see metal detecting shown in the same light as a major criminal enterprise, has mentioned the hobby as a source of archaeological malfeasance, and referencing Social Media as the source!

On the darker side of this, I've seen the results of people who view social media metal detecting posts and videos, who have profit, not history, in mind, and are happy to locate, invade and tear up a featured site looking for possible coins, jewelry or artifacts in a one-time, devil-may-care escapade, thus leaving the site off-limits to the rest of us who practice the metal detecting code of ethics in the lurch.

Now, like I said earlier, many of the metal detecting social media posts and videos are well done and interesting. I know of several sites and YouTube video channels that I anxiously AWAIT new episodes or posts to see what my friends and other hunters have found in their area. What are the answers to this issue of us all occasionally baring our sometimes dirty laundry to everyone outside the hobby?

To me, an immediate improvement would be to refrain from verbally or visually identifying the area that is being detected! In the excitement of the hunt, I've heard a few video creators identify EXACTLY where they are, sometimes mentioning it again through several episodes of an entertaining and well done video of their hunt. That's like putting a billboard up on your site DIG HERE!

Another improvement would be to not show an out-of-hand recovery you are digging...yea, your gonna' cover it up later, but for now, it looks like a drag-line project...the anti-detecting community LOVES these images! I'd love to see your find, but, unless you are cutting a perfect plug on-camera, and replacing it seamlessly, try not to display it. I've done this myself countless times, finally realizing, although I've cleaned up my hole and put everything back the way I found it, it still looked like a small construction site on my video when I was recovering something fairly large.

Well enough complaining and the gnashing of teeth here. I hope you will take my thoughts in the manner in which I made them...just trying to keep us all off the endangered detectorists list for as long as possible and maybe beating the naysayers at their own game!

Cheers!

The War On Metal Detecting: We Are Unworthy?

Okay, I decided to tackle this. mainly because I've been a treasure hunter for a long time, have friends who are long-term metal detecting hobbyists, treasure hunters, or shipwreck salvors here in Florida. One of the problems pushing this agenda, here in Florida, and elsewhere in the difficult to fathom American archaeological universe, is that Archaeology funding is drying up and they now spend more time behind a desk than in the field. And they are not happy!

And from this group there are numerous ongoing attempts to basically outlaw metal-detecting as a hobby. This is no means a fast process for them, but since we older Americans have been this route before, mostly with other sneaky and contentious issues in government and state, we can clearly see the shadows moving quite slowly and inexorably toward a hazy, but predefined goal, much better than the younger, faster moving crowd. Later there is an example, as John Howland aptly puts it, of the American archaeologists "sniffier view" of  citizen archaeologists. 

Now, I will say, some of the Archaeologists do have somewhat a point of contention, here in the U.S. of A. in regard to metal detectorists. No, really! I have seen with my own eyes, over the last half-century or more, certain Neanderthal types armed with metal detectors literally destroy, deface, and damage public and private property as well as loot archaeological sites. 

Neanderthal with a detector, if you had to ask.

This is pure ca-ca and most incidents of this sort can be traced back to those who, usually purely for profit, pass through the metal detecting hobby like bread passes through a duck...pretty quick, and not very concerned. Unlike golf, we don't have a big, grassy field, or a detecting caddy to carry our selection of coils with us and dig targets at our command (good idea though). We either have to procure a permit, get private permission, or hunt the beach. And be trained to cover our tracks as if we were never there! We do need to self-police and stop these people from sullying the hobby and leaving us in the crumbling ruins of our pastime.

However, the majority of detector operators here in the USA are concerned with doing the right thing, and, of late, you will see county historical societies asking local detecting club's help in recovering certain historical items before the next century's glass and steel are coldly poured over them for a few more hundred years. Detectorists asking museum curators for help to identify shallow-dug, locally historic finds, with the hobbyist donating their finds to the museum in return for the help. A good thing.

England has made fantastic strides in healing differences between detectorists and archaeologists, with their Portable Antiquities Scheme which has melded both groups into a winning team prompting the discovery of ancient history we would never have thought possible many years ago! Here in the Colonies though, citizens are losing metal detecting rights and freedoms faster than a cow heading into a meat-packing plant. Up until 2005, here in Florida, we had an "Isolated Finds" program, one that would let explorers, divers and detectorists report isolated finds and locations, and usually were allowed to keep the item, if it was not a rare find. Common recoveries, like maybe an arrowhead, or artifact like a bullet or musket ball...that sort of thing, were okay to find, record and report. The program came to a crashing halt (at the FDNR's request) because they touted it was a massive "failure!" 

One of the reasons State Archaeologists gave for this failure, and I'm not kidding...I'll wait for you to swallow that sip of Coca Cola first. It was because people were not reporting enough of their finds!!!!! So, how do you determine how many finds WERE made if they were NOT REPORTED??? Nuff said??? The ultimate article I found that had the academics reporting why the "Portable Antiquities Scheme" could NOT work in America! Luckily I have a portable blood pressure monitor on hand when I read this kind of academic hogwash with the attitude they spout it! Read below, then have a hot tea, WITH milk and sugar!

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130306-finders-keepers-treasure-hunting-law-uk-us/

Recently it was proposed by Florida, that for $100, you could buy a Citizens Archaeological Permit good for a year, allowing you to make finds, record them and display them, donate them, but RECORD them and the location. Do you realize the extent historic items and artifacts would come to light, recorded and cataloged? Putting another 14,000, or 20,000 or 30,000 individuals in the field, instead of the 10 or 15 on-the-payroll state archaeologists would have been a boon to both history and the state's coffers. But, you know the drill, citizens have no advanced degree in properly digging stuff up, photographing and recording them, or making up what they were/or were for, so guess what the response was? Here it is...take an aspirin first:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2016/01/13/florida-archaeologists-condemn-proposed-citizen-archaeology-permit/#13d0988b58fc

 I love the sign: "...not even the shells!!!"

My main point is we here in the U.S. who love history and this hobby better get our wagons circled soon, as the academic attack over ownership of the world in situ is coming in the near future. Here in America, we metal detectorists should be united enough to push back! And it's not the arrows I'm so worried about...it's about getting arrested for picking one of em' up!

Helping To Find Lost Things: The Art of the Search

If you have been in the hobby of metal detecting for long, you will probably have been asked at sometime, somewhere (usually on the beach or a park) to help find a frantic owner's keys, rings, jewelry, hearing aids or dog tags. This is one of the more gratifying aspects of metal detecting operations, one that actually helps someone in trouble. Sometimes you, your skills, and your instrument are the only Calvary, or Search and Rescue team the general public can access. There is no listing in the yellow pages, or online, although there are a few I call "You Pay Us, We Find It" sites online.

Most people are panicked with a severe sense of loss by the time they contact you

Most folks are panicked by the time they bring themselves to ask for your help. Grandpa's WWII medal is gone in the sand somewhere, a treasured heirloom suddenly went south, or someone's hotel key has taken a leave of absence, and it cost's $75 for a duplicate! People high on Adrenalin, code name "Fear," don't think very well in that state, so the number one priority, before you ever get your gear, is to calm the person down. Talking quietly and assuring them that you have done this before (even if you haven't) and the odds are very good you can make the recovery. 

Ask them details about the lost item just to get them talking and thinking a bit. Ask them to recall anything they have done previously that might suggest a location to start. Have they been playing volleyball? Frisbee? Been swimming? Cutting the hedges? Those kind of questions can be endless, but you need to calm them down and get a narrative. Have them tell you again to see if the story varies from the first telling.

Then start your search, using either a grid-pattern or ever-widening concentric circles, both work equally well. And take your time...the lost item isn't going anywhere. If it was lost in deep grass rather than sand, set your machine's sensitivity to a less-sensitive setting, as it will most probably be at ground level and you don't want to be digging deep junk, just the lost item.

Many of our searches have resulted in a recovery, some have not. One search, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida (one of the most shark-infested beaches in the world) was to find a $32,000 diamond wedding ring lost in the surf. The back-story was, while the new wife was sitting in a chair, letting the incoming surf wash over her, she later noticed the ring had left her finger and was gone! Due to the fact that the husband knew exactly where they had been sitting, a week earlier,  made the recovery possible in about 40-minutes time. The ring had migrated no more than 10-feet away from their location before "digging in" to the sand and anchoring itself about 6" deep. I use a large (11" to 16" diameter) coil for these type of beach recoveries. They cover a lot of ground faster and detect deep!

Another successful recovery was made by Patti and I in Winter Park, Florida. This was a rather sad affair where a college girl had lost her "Mothers Ring." Her mom had two matching rings made and given one to her and kept one on her finger. She told us she had gone to a friend's place for a Halloween party, and had pulled off her "Mothers Ring" and put it on top of some clothing in her car so she would not lose it. She then went behind a hedge in the yard to change into her costume. Unfortunately, these were the clothes she had place her ring on! Her mother and herself had searched the yard for over two weeks and found no trace of the ring. The yard, in front of a doctor's mansion, had about 3" of expensive ground cover plants, and to make matters worse, near the site of her loss, was a giant underground transformer, providing power for the entire neighborhood! Dropping the sensitivity and gain on my Minelab E-Trac down to the minimum killed most of the interference from the transformer, and allowed us, within 45-minutes, to recover the ring. The poor girl was almost in tears when we started, and to her disbelief when Patti handed her the ring!

Patti hands the ring to it's rightful owner after it was lost 2-weeks earlier

One of our abject failures came when someone who called from the town of Geneva, close by, claimed they had lost their 15-year wedding ring in the "side yard" of their home. Several things contributed to this failure; Number one, Patti was not dressed for metal detecting, wearing some designer jeans and leather fashion boots, she had been getting her hair done when I coerced her to join the hunt. Number two, some of our gear was in the car when we got the call, but, we were not really fully equipped...no spare batteries, no spare coils, and no bug spray. But it was a side yard, so what, right? The actual site did not look too bad, although quite a ways off the beaten path, nice house, green lawn. But number three was, after meeting with the owner, he indicated that he was cutting a trail through 5-acres of virgin Florida jungle when he lost the ring...hardly a side yard! After a 4-hour hunt though terrain that reminded me a lot of Vietnam, narrowly missed being bitten by a rattlesnake (the owner afterward said, "Yea, I took 6 of them outa' there last week. !?!?!?!?!) and picking up layers of tics and chiggers, I finally called it quits. We were disappointed by the failure, but we were even more disappointed we had not been fully prepared. It took almost 2-months for both of us to heal up all the tic and chigger bites, but it taught us to be prepared for anything and everything! 

Watch where you step while detecting in the wild!

The fact is, there are very few things in this world you can really do that can make a real difference in a persons life, and recovering and returning sentimental items and important possessions to them is a prime one!

The smile from the happy owner is payment enough for finding their lost property

Metal Detecting In The Good Old Days

Having been in the hobby, as it were, for so long, I have noticed changes in the language of treasure hunting. That's right...treasure hunting! A lot like the totally threatening public announcement on TV these days, "Buzzed Driving IS Drunk Driving!" I'd have to also add "Metal Detecting IS Treasure Hunting!" make no mistake about that. Let me do my "old man" voice at this point; "Back in MY day, we were called THer's not Detectorists, because the detector was simply a tool, like a shovel, a compass or a map...something that helped us get closer to a recovery. When we dug a target, I don't recall anyone saying, "Hey, Shovelist...dig a little to the left there!" or someone calling out "Where do we go next, Compasssist...sst..ss...? " well, you get the picture. Machines in the 1960's, 70's and 80's utilized what we called "analog" circuits, which for our discussion, we'll just label "no computerization," which made for a simple, yet hardy, piece of gear. The detectors were mostly made of metal, filled internally with tangled wires and large components. And the biggest joy, a seriously non-ergonomic handle. I think the oddly-bent grip was actually designed by chiropractors looking for work.

My coveted 1982 hip-mounted Garrett Deepseeker with the 8" dinner-plate search coil

You might be able to last a few hours swinging, before heading in to the hospital for wrist surgery. Additionally, the concentric search coils were not-terribly-user-friendly, especially without the see-thru design of today, but more like a thick dinner platter sans the turkey. You had to develop your "pinpoint stare," also called the "target glare" whereas you'd stare at your magic-marker-ed "X" (you had to make the X yourself) on top of the dinner-platter-coil when you got the signal centered, and remember to keep glaring at the exact spot as you swung the coil away. Theoretically, this was where you'd find the target. This is also where a good coin-probe would come in, and you'd have to make that yourself too, grinding the living daylights out of the end of an old ice-pick, carefully rounding off the tip. A lot of people used a Craftsman screwdriver to probe for and pop targets out of the ground. The problem here was the beautiful scratch the sharp-edge of the screwdriver's blade made across a recently-flawless Standing Liberty. After just one such an incident, you'd find many a THer rounding off the edge of an ice-pick in a dimly lighted garage. I knew guys who could detect a target, then slide the probe into the ground and pop the coin out, without leaving so much as a mark in the grass!

Don't use a screwdriver as a coin probe...nuff' said

Another technical shortfall back then, which is business-as-usual today, was that the clever, infinitely useful slim little pulse-induction pin-pointer had not been developed yet. Consider the fact that the electronics needed to drive your basic metal detector in the 60's and 70's required the same amount of space usually found in a standard shoe box, so a hand-held metal detector the size of a large cigar was right up there with a working hand phaser from Star Trek. So we tromped indelicately with all our squarish and bulky metal detecting machines across parks, open schoolyards (back when they were not the barb-wired enclosed prison yards of today) and private land. Beach and SHALLOW water detecting was okay as long as you placed a plastic bag over the control box (then, as now, search coils were somewhat waterproof) and limited your depth of water to knee deep.

People ask me if silver coins were found in quantity back then, and when I tell them of all the silver we did recover, they sigh and say they wish they had started in the hobby at that time. I explain that there was a lot of lost silver literally laying around then, but the technology to recover it was not as advanced as it is now, so we recovered coins slower and in direct proportion to the ability of the machines of that time, so deeper layers of lost coinage are becoming available to the advanced technology today that we could not touch back then.Welcome to the future!

My New Blog

The Professor During A "Tech Talk"

Welcome! This site is still somewhat under construction...the layout is not yet quite right and I am still digitally twisting the little bugger (Blogger) to my will...hopefully. I am a long-time treasure hunter (50-years plus), an engineer, a former pilot, a scuba diver, a musician, an amateur astronomer, a photographer and a somewhat regular guy. I am a member of a few metal detecting clubs here in Central Florida, and everyone I run into keeps telling me to "...start a blog, for crying out loud!" due to the fact I prodigiously write a lot, lecture a lot, and clog up other peoples blogs with my comments on metal detecting a lot. I do a regular (or irregular to hear some tell it) live "tech talk" on metal detecting subjects at my club, where they refer to me as the "professor," which reminds me, mostly, of the guy stuck on Gilligan's Island who was hot on Ginger or Mary-Ann...I can't remember which. I will be sharing my thoughts, musings and actual exciting adventures with my friends and club members. I am not making this purely about metal detecting, but will swerve off that occasionally as I segway into different subjects I am feeling passionate about. I'm sure I will foster some disagreement among a few people along the way, but that's good. Who wants everyone to have the same opinion, other than some political group? Not I! Thanks for you interest and stuff like that.