Beach Detecting - Numbers to Hunt By

The other day while beach hunting, and viewing other people detecting at low tide, I started to wonder how much beach there was to search at low tide...I mean, how many chances to find something in the sand or tide flats are there? So I set about trying to put some scale to the problem. People, including me, always say that we have too many people metal detecting the beach. But the question that begs an answer is: do we? Do we really?

Google Map Image of Daytona Beach, Florida

Now the most popular beach in Central Florida is Daytona-Ormond Beach, and famous the world over according to the tourist literature, and certainly a favorite among the local metal detecting clubs; Daytona Dig & Find Club as well as the Central Florida Metal Detecting Club. One thing the beach certainly is, it is wide at low tide...almost 500-feet wide as a matter of fact. They used to race cars there in the old days, and cars still can drive the beach in certain places along the beach. Daytona Beach is approximately 25-miles long, (more like 23, but jeesh!) but I picked an arbitrary point from the tip of New Smyrna Beach (the most dangerous shark attack beach in the world.) to the south than up to just past Flagler Beach to the north. A distance of somewhere around 25-miles of detectable beach.

Most standard search coils usually come in at around 11" in diameter, but for this instance, I'm going to add an inch to the coil and make it 12," i.e. a "foot" in diameter. You can recalculate later for a 11" diameter coil if you want, or an 8" or a 6" but really the 12" coil size is just to make a point.

Take the distance up the coast, 25- miles, multiply it by the number of feet in a mile; 5,280' which comes to 132,000 feet. Then multiply the beach length in feet by it's width in feet, which is about 500' and you get the square footage for Daytona Beach's beach. Since you have a 12" coil in this example, it just about covers a square foot, and according to our calculations, you have exactly 66,000,000 square feet to hunt within Daytona-Ormond Beach. That's right, sixty-six million coil locations available that may have something hiding under the sand. And if you can successfully and properly sweep a square foot of beach sand in about 2-seconds time, it will take you around 2,410 years to fully hunt the beach! I guess we'd best get started!