trash

WTD CAMP - Samples

(Approx. 570 words)

To bring home the bacon you’ve got to take out the trash!

Bill Camp

I came home the other day very proud. I had only been out metal detecting for about an hour and I had recovered nearly thirty coins amounting to almost $4.00. What’s more impressive is that I had not dug a single piece of trash. I was all over the house bragging about my skill as an expert detectorist.

Later that week my wife went out with me and we detected together for several hours. She shares my interest in the hobby and keeps all of the stats on what we recover, where we find it, and how much it‘s worth. When we got home and compared spoils, as expected, her expert pinpointing led her to the lead in coin count. But alas not all was lost, my unsurpassed ability in quarter and dime popping had tipped the dollar column in my favor. All was right with the world … or was it?

I started looking at the retrievals and noted a glaring disparity in two categories. For every piece of trash I had dug, my wife had dug two. As for coins, her penny count was significantly higher and she had recovered 4 nickels to my big ZERO. Now why should this meager nuance present worry for an ‘expert detectorist’ like me, after all, I was the one who had the higher dollar total? Well it all comes down to odds, and the clearest vision ever, that I was reducing my odds significantly of finding gold rings and high value items. Clearly people lose nickels, as my wife’s recent stats prove, but I was not digging them – meaning somebody else was. That might be fine if nickels were the only thing at stake, but we all know that the nickel and trash conductivity range is the favorite hiding place for gold. Unfortunately, over the past few weeks, I had probably passed over a few choice finds in my eager quest to be an expert and never dig trash!

I should have known better since I have read all of those guys that say, turn off the discrimination, get on your knees and dig every peep your detector even thinks about peeping. The truth is for most sites, this strategy is the metal detecting equivalent of beating your head on a wall. Unless you are on the moon or detecting the Mariana Trench, pull tabs and trash are a big part of the hobby, and there’s too little time to dig it all. So I still recommend a balanced approach when it comes to your quest for the gold. Be practical and use your head while working a site. Don’t dig high conductivity tones exclusively, and don’t dig every iron signal you get, unless you are looking for relics. Dig every mid penny tone and all 4-way hits in the the nickel conductivity range, especially in low trash sites. Keep statistics of your finds and set achievable goals for quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, tabs, trash, and the overall coin count for every site. Make it routine to recover at least one nickel per outing and a pouch full of trash. With lots of practice, you’ll soon have cleaner parks, stacks of nickels, and likely a few gold baubles for your effort. True ‘experts’ may not always bring home the bacon, but they definitely do bring home the trash! Happy Hunting.

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WTD CAMP, 1257 Whispering Pines Dr., St. Louis, MO 63146 ~(314) 439-5490 ~ [email protected]