I took my Sand Shark on its maiden voyage today 2 hours before the noon low tide. I had just worked myself though 3-4 targets when lightning struck not 15 minutes into the hunt! I look into the scoop and I see a nice, big, fatty yellow with very nice color! I look inside and I see an inscription and a Karat mark which I couldn't completely make out. I put it on and it’s a tight fit but I know it’s got some size to it because I've got big fingers. My next target after the ring is a chain, although it’s junk I've never gotten a plain chain with the CZ. Sometime in the middle of the hunt I felt whips of fire from my ankles down. It was excruciating pain! OMG!!! I tried to turn out of it but that just made it worse and I got nailed in other parts of my legs. In my suffering, I start looking for the culprit and all I could see was a pretty decent Man O’ War about 20 feet away. I couldn’t believe the range on that sucker!! In all my years water detecting I had never been nailed like that. And to top it off, some time later, I felt something at my legs and it scared the cr*p out of me! It happened to be a crab that I think was attracted by something in my dangling pouch and he came after it. (Well I chased him just so that he could understand who the BOSS was! ) I get home I put on my reading glasses and I see 18K in the ring and it weighs in at 8.4 grs. Of course I was I was very disappointed to be a few dollars short of completely paying off my machine on its 1st hunt. At only 28 cents of clad I was a bit disappointed that the clad vs. trash ratio was so poor. But hey, I'll take it if I can find a yellow like that every time!
Impressions of the Sand Shark
It’s deeper than my CZ for sure! It almost felt like hunting with the CZ in “autotune” mode. I didn’t find it difficult to set. I had read some of the posts on this forum regarding SS settings and experimented with some of them at times during the hunt. In the 1st hour my hand was killing me from the poor weight balance of the detector in the top position above my elbow. I then moved it to the lower position and my hand didn’t hurt as much but it created a lot of drag in the water. The CZ is much better balanced if you had to hunt with it mounted on the shaft, which I do not. I will either be hip mounting it or finding a way to use it on my CZ’s chest mount which I prefer.
Impressions of the Sand Shark
It’s deeper than my CZ for sure! It almost felt like hunting with the CZ in “autotune” mode. I didn’t find it difficult to set. I had read some of the posts on this forum regarding SS settings and experimented with some of them at times during the hunt. In the 1st hour my hand was killing me from the poor weight balance of the detector in the top position above my elbow. I then moved it to the lower position and my hand didn’t hurt as much but it created a lot of drag in the water. The CZ is much better balanced if you had to hunt with it mounted on the shaft, which I do not. I will either be hip mounting it or finding a way to use it on my CZ’s chest mount which I prefer.