2015 Metal Detecting Year in Review

2015 was my first year metal detecting, I learned a lot about the hobby, found a lot of pop tabs and garbage, and even some cool stuff buried under the ground. I had a blast while doing all of it, and I'm already getting excited for the snow to melt and the ground to thaw so I can get out detecting. I was introduced to the hobby by my dad when he fulfilled a childhood dream of treasure hunting and bought a Bounty Hunter metal detector he saw in a flyer of a local electronics store. After reading through the instruction manual and testing out his new toy on various coins and jewellery lying around the house we were ready to head out on our first treasure hunting quest. Our cottage is located on the site of a bunky for a century old saw mill where we are constantly finding turn of the century bottles so we thought this would be the ideal location to find some relics.

Finds from first time detecting my cottage

While we didn't uncover any buried treasure chests or relics that should be shipped off straight to a museum, we did find some cool old cans and bottles that had been buried by the workers decades ago. I had so much fun this first time that I decided to do some research and buy a detector myself. After some research and the advice of the metal detecting subreddit I bought myself a Teknetics Delta 4000 and got out hunting.

As a beginner the most challenging things for me were finding good places to detect and dig, and how to properly use my machine and pin point items so I wasn't digging craters in the ground every time I found something. I didn't know anyone else into the hobby so I turned to the internet for tips. Reddit came to the rescue again and I found lots of useful information on the metal detecting subreddit, and even help from users who answered my questions. Armed with this information I set myself up with a kit of all my metal detecting tools, and started out detecting the local beaches and parks.

My metal detecting pouch and it's contents

Below are some of the highlights of my finds from last year. I spent a lot of my times out detecting last year working on learning what my machine was identifying, and how to pin point it. I pretty much dug any signal I had even if I was certain it was nail or pull tab. I ended up digging a lot of junk but got pretty good at identifying what kind of metal or object something was before even digging and also was able to greatly shrink the size of my holes and time searching for an item.

Bullets and shells from local beaches and parks

I was really surprised at how many bullets and shells I found detecting the local beaches and parks, especially as some of the fired bullets that I found had landed right in parks where lots of people walk and play. I was also surprised to find a dropped .38 Special buried in a park about 100 feet away from a swing set (maybe it was dropped by a police officer decades ago).

Clad coins from beaches and parks

I found enough clad (modern) coins to buy myself a few coffees, I'm certainly not getting rich with this hobby especially since most of the coins I found were pennies which aren't even official currency in Canada any more. I do enjoy finding coins and they were probably the most interesting things that I found while out detecting.

My first silver coin

My fist silver coin I found was a 1942 dime. It's not in the greatest shape and isn't centuries old however for me this was a cool find being my first non clad coin and 73 years old. This was the first Canadian coin that I had seen that was so old that it didn't have the Queen on it.

My oldest coin a 1920 one cent piece

My oldest coin of the year was a 1920 one cent piece that my my dad and I found while detecting a local beach. This coin is in very rough shape and is barely identifiable, at first I thought it was just a beat up clad penny. When I got it home and was able to clean it up a bit and look at it under a magnifying glass I was able to identify it. This find for me was really interesting as I found it fascinating to dig up something that someone had dropped almost 100 years ago. As I'm sure a lot of detectors do I started wondering about who dropped it, and what they were doing at the beach so long ago when they dropped it.

My most memorable and also most valuable find of the year I wasn't able to get a picture of or keep. While relaxing at the beach with my girlfriend I noticed a group of people intensely searching through the sand clearly looking for something. After a few minutes of watching I noticed another person join them with a brand new metal detector that they were un-boxing from the local radio shack. The new metal detector wasn't aiding their search as the operator didn't unfold the coil so it was parallel with the ground after setting it up. I had my detector and gear in my car as I was planning on detecting the beach after most people cleared out. I went over and asked what they were looking for and offered to help with my detector. It turned out one of the ladies had lost one of her gold and diamond earrings that she told me was worth $5000, I don't know a lot about jewellery however she showed me the pair to the missing earring and it looked quite impressive with a lot of large diamonds on it. After turning off my iron discrimination as I had heard that sometimes gold can come up in the iron frequency I was able to locate her earring. As I'm sure you could guess she was ecstatic with getting her missing earring back. I was glad that I was able to help.

While I didn't strike it rich this year with any of my finds. I had a lot of fun learning about metal detecting and uncovering some things from the ground that I thought were pretty neat. If you have any questions about detecting or any cool stories I'd love to hear about them in the comments below.

Andrew Bellini-Rutledge

Electrical Engineer in Training.

Twitter: @The_ABR

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/AndrewBellini

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