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.