DIGGER27
In Memory Of
Whew...you have no idea how deliriously happy and unstressed I am at this moment.
I set a goal to find 12 gold targets of any shape or form back in March when I found my third for the year.
A crazy pie in the sky goal...who finds that many gold targets hunting only in dirt in public parks?
My best year ever was only 6, and I consider that lucky.
I think I read a few posts from some members that have done it, and maybe a few more that found a few more than 12 to boot, but I can tell you of only one person I know personally that has done it....ME!
The weather was nice today but tomorrow it rains in the morning and then might make it up to the low 40's with some 20-30 MPH winds so that does not sound like fun, then it nosedives to the 20's after that and snow and nasty stuff is coming our way too so when I say this last gold target showed up just in the nick of time I mean it.
This might have been the last hunt of the year for me but we will see how things shake out.
I went to a park that I know is one of the older ones in our county, one of the first the Park and Recreation district dedicated back in 1958.
I have been here before plenty of times and found lots of clad and junk jewelry and other odds and ends but that is about it.
Now I have a new machine and this thing seems to make my old sites brand new again, or at least it did on the 3 previous hunts I had with it.
First stop was a basketball court that also gave up nothing but clad in the past and today there was very little of that.
I cleaned this area up pretty good in several previous hunts so I moved away from it and hunted some grass areas a little further away.
Next to a tree caught up in some roots I found this half a buck Uncle Sam play money coin that had a date...1954.
That dates this park nicely, I think.
Found a little more clad after that and then moved across the road to a picnic pavilion.
Hunted all over here in the past, too, and like before not even much clad here and I guess that is thanks to me.
Still plenty of trash here, however, and the F70 was painting quite a picture for me with all the signals and noise, but not many of them were solid or sounded good to me as I swung over them so I let most of them lay.
I moved around past the end of the structure where there is a little more grass and a picnic table.
Still trash all over the place, I did dig a few signals that came in around nickels and were solid but they were can slaw and tabs and also found a few solid signals in all that and found a few coins.
The wife calls and I had her car and she wanted me to pick her up from work early so this was going to be a short hunt.
I don't know where I got this luck or good Karma that I seemed to have all year in this search...nay, quest for gold, but it happened again after about 1 1/2 hours into this hunt with only 20 minutes or so left before I had to go.
I was swinging around and listening close and I did hear a nice high tone that made me stop and look at the screen and then make a few more passes over that small area.
There was definitely some kind of trash here, the numbers jumped around pretty good and even through many sections, but I did manage to maneuver that coil carefully and find that high tone signal again and it was a nickel area type, (4H mode on the F70 changes all nickel signals to high tones), with numbers that only slightly jumped from 30 to 33 but a slight movement and it jumped way out of that range again.
If you watch the move you can see what I mean when I rolled the coil over the area to show you the signal.
I knew there was a couple of things hidden here but I did not care about the piece of garbage that I knew was there, I only cared about whatever made that more solid nickel signal that was near it so I bent over and found it with the Propointer and opened a small hole.
I really hoped for decent size gold but I expected a nickel or another piece of can slaw or something else junky but when I flipped the plug over I looked in the hole and actually dropped my jaw.
Maybe the last hunt of the season and just a few minutes left to go and what do I see but something round and silver and gold in color.
Could it be?
Could my luck be that good, could Karma be with me today and is the universe be paying me back for the trick it played on me just yesterday when it threw a salesman's sample low grade or no gold fake class ring in my path to elate and then deflate me?
I was so excited because it looked like gold, it cleaned off easily like gold, it was heavy like gold and you can feel my excitement in the movie.
It was a nice one with a band of yellow gold in the front surrounded by what I assume was white gold and a nice square kind of back end.
Then I cleaned out the middle and looked and not a mark of any kind to be seen.
Not a hint, not a partial faded out piece of anything, nothing...like it was ground and buffed clean.
Great.
I try to live a good life and be nice and courteous and helpful to others, why does this have to happen now when I am within minutes of leaving and virtually no chance of finding another real one if this one goes bad on me.
"Sigh"...
I checked it again and out of the hole and it was a solid 31 on every pass, right where it should be for a gold ring this size so I still had hope.
Ok, there is still a chance that it is real, but now I have to drive to the jewelers and have this thing checked out and quick because by now I am dying to know if I hit that goal or didn't...and oh how I wanted to complete this quest.
Luckily the jeweler is right on the way to and about a mile away from where my wife works so I pack up everything and get out of there.
I go in and give it to the nice girl and said do whatever you need to to test it..
There was already a slight scratch on the front gold part and a nick on the band which is the silver part and I told her if you need to enlarge these a bit to use the acid go for it but I just need to know.
I waited about 5 minutes while she went in the back where all the testing was done, I hoped that was a good thing.
Finally she came back out, I held my breath and asked her what was the verdict and she looked at me and casually said the whole ring tested as 14 karat.
I also acted very casual...oh heck that is a lie, I don't remember much after the words 14 karat came out of her lips and most of it was kind of a blur, but I do remember she asked if I wanted to know how much this 6.2 gram beauty was worth.
I said sure, what the heck and she did some weighing and figuring and offered me $80 for the thing and I think she expected me to sell it to her right then and there.
I said let me think about and I will let her know, all the while knowing I can get close to double that from ARA or even more if I sell it as a ring.
I also had some pictures to take, a story to write and some admiring to do so she wasn't getting this thing for 80 bucks or 800 till I was ready to stop looking at it.
Actually it is a nice one so this one I might keep for me but it is actually a about a half size too big for even my hammy finger so we will just sit on it and decide what to do with it at a future date.
So that is the story of the very end of the great gold quest of 2013.
Quite an adventure all along the way with thrills and chills and even a few disappointments thrown in for good measure.
Maybe there will be a little more hunting time for me this year and if there is I can tell you there is only one thing better than setting a difficult goal and hitting it and that is passing it.
It took me one hunt to find silver with my new hunting buddy and only 4 hunts and 10 hours to find gold and I am nowhere near as good with this thing as I know I am going to be.
It is a very capable beast and we are going to make a great team for the foreseeable future and in this I know for sure.
Waiting out the winter season for good weather to come back around is going to be difficult now that I know what we can accomplish as a team, but next year watch out.
Now my only task is to decide what kind of crazy goal to set for next year.
I set a goal to find 12 gold targets of any shape or form back in March when I found my third for the year.
A crazy pie in the sky goal...who finds that many gold targets hunting only in dirt in public parks?
My best year ever was only 6, and I consider that lucky.
I think I read a few posts from some members that have done it, and maybe a few more that found a few more than 12 to boot, but I can tell you of only one person I know personally that has done it....ME!
The weather was nice today but tomorrow it rains in the morning and then might make it up to the low 40's with some 20-30 MPH winds so that does not sound like fun, then it nosedives to the 20's after that and snow and nasty stuff is coming our way too so when I say this last gold target showed up just in the nick of time I mean it.
This might have been the last hunt of the year for me but we will see how things shake out.
I went to a park that I know is one of the older ones in our county, one of the first the Park and Recreation district dedicated back in 1958.
I have been here before plenty of times and found lots of clad and junk jewelry and other odds and ends but that is about it.
Now I have a new machine and this thing seems to make my old sites brand new again, or at least it did on the 3 previous hunts I had with it.
First stop was a basketball court that also gave up nothing but clad in the past and today there was very little of that.
I cleaned this area up pretty good in several previous hunts so I moved away from it and hunted some grass areas a little further away.
Next to a tree caught up in some roots I found this half a buck Uncle Sam play money coin that had a date...1954.
That dates this park nicely, I think.
Found a little more clad after that and then moved across the road to a picnic pavilion.
Hunted all over here in the past, too, and like before not even much clad here and I guess that is thanks to me.
Still plenty of trash here, however, and the F70 was painting quite a picture for me with all the signals and noise, but not many of them were solid or sounded good to me as I swung over them so I let most of them lay.
I moved around past the end of the structure where there is a little more grass and a picnic table.
Still trash all over the place, I did dig a few signals that came in around nickels and were solid but they were can slaw and tabs and also found a few solid signals in all that and found a few coins.
The wife calls and I had her car and she wanted me to pick her up from work early so this was going to be a short hunt.
I don't know where I got this luck or good Karma that I seemed to have all year in this search...nay, quest for gold, but it happened again after about 1 1/2 hours into this hunt with only 20 minutes or so left before I had to go.
I was swinging around and listening close and I did hear a nice high tone that made me stop and look at the screen and then make a few more passes over that small area.
There was definitely some kind of trash here, the numbers jumped around pretty good and even through many sections, but I did manage to maneuver that coil carefully and find that high tone signal again and it was a nickel area type, (4H mode on the F70 changes all nickel signals to high tones), with numbers that only slightly jumped from 30 to 33 but a slight movement and it jumped way out of that range again.
If you watch the move you can see what I mean when I rolled the coil over the area to show you the signal.
I knew there was a couple of things hidden here but I did not care about the piece of garbage that I knew was there, I only cared about whatever made that more solid nickel signal that was near it so I bent over and found it with the Propointer and opened a small hole.
I really hoped for decent size gold but I expected a nickel or another piece of can slaw or something else junky but when I flipped the plug over I looked in the hole and actually dropped my jaw.
Maybe the last hunt of the season and just a few minutes left to go and what do I see but something round and silver and gold in color.
Could it be?
Could my luck be that good, could Karma be with me today and is the universe be paying me back for the trick it played on me just yesterday when it threw a salesman's sample low grade or no gold fake class ring in my path to elate and then deflate me?
I was so excited because it looked like gold, it cleaned off easily like gold, it was heavy like gold and you can feel my excitement in the movie.
It was a nice one with a band of yellow gold in the front surrounded by what I assume was white gold and a nice square kind of back end.
Then I cleaned out the middle and looked and not a mark of any kind to be seen.
Not a hint, not a partial faded out piece of anything, nothing...like it was ground and buffed clean.
Great.
I try to live a good life and be nice and courteous and helpful to others, why does this have to happen now when I am within minutes of leaving and virtually no chance of finding another real one if this one goes bad on me.
"Sigh"...
I checked it again and out of the hole and it was a solid 31 on every pass, right where it should be for a gold ring this size so I still had hope.
Ok, there is still a chance that it is real, but now I have to drive to the jewelers and have this thing checked out and quick because by now I am dying to know if I hit that goal or didn't...and oh how I wanted to complete this quest.
Luckily the jeweler is right on the way to and about a mile away from where my wife works so I pack up everything and get out of there.
I go in and give it to the nice girl and said do whatever you need to to test it..
There was already a slight scratch on the front gold part and a nick on the band which is the silver part and I told her if you need to enlarge these a bit to use the acid go for it but I just need to know.
I waited about 5 minutes while she went in the back where all the testing was done, I hoped that was a good thing.
Finally she came back out, I held my breath and asked her what was the verdict and she looked at me and casually said the whole ring tested as 14 karat.
I also acted very casual...oh heck that is a lie, I don't remember much after the words 14 karat came out of her lips and most of it was kind of a blur, but I do remember she asked if I wanted to know how much this 6.2 gram beauty was worth.
I said sure, what the heck and she did some weighing and figuring and offered me $80 for the thing and I think she expected me to sell it to her right then and there.
I said let me think about and I will let her know, all the while knowing I can get close to double that from ARA or even more if I sell it as a ring.
I also had some pictures to take, a story to write and some admiring to do so she wasn't getting this thing for 80 bucks or 800 till I was ready to stop looking at it.
Actually it is a nice one so this one I might keep for me but it is actually a about a half size too big for even my hammy finger so we will just sit on it and decide what to do with it at a future date.
So that is the story of the very end of the great gold quest of 2013.
Quite an adventure all along the way with thrills and chills and even a few disappointments thrown in for good measure.
Maybe there will be a little more hunting time for me this year and if there is I can tell you there is only one thing better than setting a difficult goal and hitting it and that is passing it.
It took me one hunt to find silver with my new hunting buddy and only 4 hunts and 10 hours to find gold and I am nowhere near as good with this thing as I know I am going to be.
It is a very capable beast and we are going to make a great team for the foreseeable future and in this I know for sure.
Waiting out the winter season for good weather to come back around is going to be difficult now that I know what we can accomplish as a team, but next year watch out.
Now my only task is to decide what kind of crazy goal to set for next year.
