Coin Patch Enigma

At certain active beaches there are events..surfing, volleyball, soccer, ironman, etc...Also big strings of portapotties or changing areas are set up then taken down afterwards...

Vendors come and set up pop-ups/food carts and sell various items and sundries...Generally not on the main beach, but off to the side or at the parking lot edge on the sand that is not the towel line where a guy would normally be sweeping for coins...So these places simply get missed by most hunters who are heading straight to the towel line or else straight to the water....

Good on you for finding one of those clad heavy locations!

I think MudPup has the right answer. Most likely a spot where vendors have set up over the years.

There is a local beach that allows parking (free) along the streets on the sandy soil. It also has pay to park areas at most of the entrances to the beach. When the beach got renourished I decided to expand my search area to the areas where people park. Lots of coins just waiting for me to find them. Not much else in the way of Precious metal. Any place where people visit, play, pull keys out of a pocket will have coins that have been dropped.

Don't question the nectar gods. Just keep swinging.

I agree with Mud here. You stated the coins were in "pockets" or groups. This area could be where there is an annual event or reunion and they have a bunch of coins buried for kids to dig for. Like the old fashioned saw dust piles.

hoser said:

I agree with Mud here. You stated the coins were in "pockets" or groups. This area could be where there is an annual event or reunion and they have a bunch of coins buried for kids to dig for. Like the old fashioned saw dust piles.

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Yep...

When I detect parks, I often will look for holes in the ground that indicate where tents are setup repeatedly (from the stakes, or poles). I often will find clusters of stuff around those items.

As a general rule, if I find more than 2 or 3 items in a small area, I'll circle it to look for more drops, due to this very thing.

As I was reading your post, I was about to attribute the pocket to mother nature grouping targets @ the in/out movement of sand (inter-tidal zone). But then noticed you're saying the pocket is way back, in the dry sand. Presumably long-removed from any recent year's tide/swells to have reached ?

I've seen dry sand dunes area, "way far from the water's reach" yet know for a fact that 10 or 20 yrs. ago, there was indeed cuts and spring/summer-refill (new dune creation) is those spots. But it doesn't seem likely that if mother nature had created a pocket (via erosion/re-fill) that it would remain so easy all those years later.

So it sounds like Mud-puppy is right. There's some recreational/touristy reason for a random heavy concentration.

Example: At a beach in So. CA, I once pulled over 100 coins from the base of an elevated sidewalk. Because all along that street-frontage, was parking meters. And the location of the meters was a mere few feet from the drop-off to the sand. Thus years of people who feed the meters, have occasional coins roll off the edge. I guess the locals don't bother harvesting the zone, because it is, no doubt, 99.9999% coins only. With almost zero chance of jewelry. Since it's not the swim zone, not the beach blanket zone. The heavy concentration was d/t strictly an activity that is likely to produce zero jewelry. But ... it was fun to dig non-stop clad for a bit, haha

Mud-puppy said:

At certain active beaches there are events..surfing, volleyball, soccer, ironman, etc...Also big strings of portapotties or changing areas are set up then taken down afterwards...

Vendors come and set up pop-ups/food carts and sell various items and sundries...Generally not on the main beach, but off to the side or at the parking lot edge on the sand that is not the towel line where a guy would normally be sweeping for coins...So these places simply get missed by most hunters who are heading straight to the towel line or else straight to the water....

Good on you for finding one of those clad heavy locations!

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Since it is away from the normal wet sand and surf, I think mud's answer is correct. Coins in that area can go deeper due to heavy rains making for a saturated sand/water area. A change in the sand/soil composition can cause them to stop or it may be just that the sand area that gets saturated does not go much deeper and the coins stop sinking.