The Golden Olde - On the road
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Today marks a milestone and a new chapter our lives as we begin a new treasure hunting saga in our new motor home. Last night we spent in Sinton, Texas at a RV park by a golf course. It was the winter hangout of many of the snowbirds from the north that don't care for roughing it in the cold! Tonight we are parked in South Padre Island off the tip of Texas and hooked up and wired in as I write this article. We have a 30-foot, Ford V10 powered motor home, and we are pleased to have our friends James Mayfield and his wife Jean down from Kentucky. James is an old hand at doing this but we are novices and sure enough we didn't bring the connections that we need for sewer hookup, the converters for all the strange plug-ins that you find at the RV parks and especially the long wires that you need to reach the boxes.
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The road into the island was full of young people loaded down with iceboxes and loads of wood for campfires on the beach. Spring break was in, and this was the place for the big one. We walked to the beach over the huge sand dunes and soft sand trail to see the beach full of young people but few in swimming. I sat and watched to size up the beach and analyze the hottest hunting spots. The wet sand was hard packed, level, and no cuts. The people were all up into the soft dry sand and mostly located in one area. There was hardly place to stand in among them. I could see that the little gold ankle chains, earrings, and neck chains should be buried in the sand in abundance with a few rings too perhaps.
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The tides are not as good as I had hoped and a brisk cold front blew through to lower the warm tropical temps to around 60 this morning. We hit the beach and there were few people on it but soon discovered that someone must have followed up the party last night because the beach was typical of one that had been hunted hard. There were few coins and a lot of trash and beer cans. I found a few coins but my wife found a 10K Gold ring and James's son Jonathan found a silver ring. All in all it was not what we had expected but I suspect that someone had swept the beach last night and done a good job.
There are more options and other stretches of beach however that may be loaded and virtually untouched so we have hope yet that we may locate some good finds.
(Follow-up) This morning we hit the beach again to be astounded by sheer numbers of hunters. Every time I plan a trip to a beach all I find is more hunters!! Drat! I stopped counting when I got around a dozen and all of them were very close by. Nevertheless, good technique will pay off some. They didn't seem to be finding anything of value but a few coins. One fellow with a CZ20 looked to know what he was doing but the others seemed to be mostly coin hunters. The wife and I found some coins but again I was scooped by her and she found a silver ring and not to mention a $20 bill!
Lessons Learned: Something for you to remember when you first walk out onto a strange new beach is that you should hunt for about 30 minutes and then stop and then analyze the history and the probable finds if you continue to hunt this beach. You should pay very close attention to the depth of finds, the patterns of finds, the number of finds, and lastly the quality of the finds themselves. In this case I correctly analyzed this beach because I realized that there were an extreme low quantity of "fresh drop". Fresh drop is determined by the number of people using the beach and the type of these people(kids, families, or tourists). I figured that there were a great number of kids who loose few items of jewelry (except silver) but that the fresh dropped items would be mostly coins and a few silver things in one given day. You rate the hunting pressure accordingly: Lots of likely fresh drop but you found the beach 98% clean means you not only have an abundance of daytime hunters but you also have nighttime hunters too. These are the ones that get 98% of the fresh drop. Families will drop more on any given day and the quality will be much higher. The highest fresh drop will be tourists and the only crowd that will produce a high tally of quality gold. By the word tourists I do not mean the spring break kids. The depth of the finds were almost all very shallow with the exceptions of a very, very few deep nickels that no one found. The number of finds was very low, the quality was very low, the pattern of finds was only in those spots where all the other hunters missed. Correctly analyzed this beach was the worst beach that I had ever hunted with the highest hunting pressure. I had miscalculated on my site for the spring break party and I should have emailed more of the local area hunters for more feedback before I left. Needless to say it was a great experience and a lot of fun. I talked to one hunter shortly before we left and he said that he had seen over thirty hunters on the beach and he hunted it nearly all night. It would have been more fun to bring back a ton of golden goodies however, and I plan to obtain more information before my next beach outing. All was not lost as I discovered the ruins of a very old Spanish Mission and also found some farm fields that should be loaded with Texas and Mexican Army finds. I hope that this story will provide you with the information that you will need if you want to find your own "golden beach".