Water Hunting
Your plan sounded great enough, buy the best metal detectors you can afford, head down to the beach, and laugh all the way home with all of your newfound riches and wealth. It never works that easy, especially not if you don’t have a solid plan in place and the experience to know what you’re doing. Searching the beach might leave you empty handed with your pockets dry. So why not get wet?
Water hunting with your metal detector is harder than detecting on the sand, or any place where there's solid ground. There’s two main reasons for this. The first is obvious, if you’re searching underwater, you can’t really see what you’re doing. This really makes the process more complicated until you have lots of experience doing it.
Secondly, the sand and dirt that lies on the bottom of the water is always on the move. Tides, currents and animals are all moving everything around. This makes things harder to keep track of and in a tricky spot can make a great find disappear before you can scoop it up. However, it also means more opportunities when you know what you’re doing. Even using cheap metal detectors, each and every tide cycle is a fresh start, with everything moved around and nobody with a leg up on you.
When you start water hunting, you want to start in shallow water. This keeps your eyes in the game to start with and allows you the time to adjust to what you’re doing under there. The more confident you get, go out deeper. Don’t be discouraged if in shallow water you aren’t finding much. Just like with land, there’s going to be a lot of trash, and places will be highly trafficked. It’s when you go out to harder or deeper areas that things can really pick up.
When you’re on the beach, very light items, such as the tops to soda cans, will almost always be closer to shore due to the tides. Other trash items will be cleaned up by beach patrols. This means as you go deeper, the chances of finding trash diminish. Also remember that heavier objects will find the deepest nearby place to rest. Find the natural grooves and contours of the waterbed and search in those spots for more success.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that as mentioned, the tide is always moving things around. This means that there will often be very thick layers of dirt and sand covering up some truly great treasures. You want to really key on those faint signals you here and go for it. As mentioned, those light soda can tops and things of that nature won’t be there in the deep waters. So shoot for those faint signals, head out to deeper waters and bring home something great!
Don’t worry about needing to spend all of your savings just to get a metal detector good enough for this kind of searching either. All quality used metal detectors will be able to find what you’re looking for. Ultimately it’s up to you and your skills and experience to be able to listen to what it’s telling you and bring home the prize.
