Lemonade

Last week fed ex stopped by the shop with a box for me, aahh yes my Sandy has arrived!! Come to poppa my lil’ friend!! In the previous weeks leading up to this purchase I was pondering how little time I have to hone my detecting skills, between home and work there just wasn’t any time left for detecting, meanwhile reading in the forums about Terry in New York just killing it up there with his beach detector.

Now I don’t know how he ended up stuck up in NY but being from Arizona that’s just got to be brutal. What I do know is that Terry knows lemonade!! At first you could tell his spirit was a bit down, he wasn’t even on the forums for a while…then he started squeezing the lemons, got himself a Tesoro Sandshark and started working the beaches, with a good degree of success I might add, then his normal posts came rolling in to the forums accompanied by some photo’s and some youtube video’s,  yep… ol’ Terry was back!!

That got me to thinking …I got started in this hobby of metal detecting back in and around 94-95  with beach detecting, and now I’ve kind of put it to the side and focused on gold prospecting, maybe Terry’s on to something !! Maybe it’s time to get back to my roots. So there it was..sitting in front of me like the winning lottery ticket at the local SPMA door prize giveaway, my own Tesoro Sandshark all wrapped up in bubble-wrap and waiting to be put together and put through its paces.

I considered several models before settling on this one, nothing was based on price, it was just based on what was being said on the forums about the particular models I was considering, one high end model had folks talking about cheap dials that would break off and they were ending up replacing them with aftermarket dials (forget that!!) but there was one detector that everyone was happy with (Including Terry) and that was the Tesoro Sandshark. Most of the detectors I currently own will work at the beach but they are of an aging fleet…the newest being at least ten years old, so I wanted something current and made specifically for what I’m going to use it for.

The Internet…when used to your advantage can be the greatest tool of them all for finding treasure!

So now the game plan is to put this detector together and hit the beach this weekend and practice, practice, practice, needless to say 5 am is a bit too much for me so I opted for an afternoon run to a beach in Coronado,Ca…near the historic “Del“.

I took my 12 yr old daughter for company and to see if she would have enough attention span to work the Bounty Hunter I bought her a year ago, its hard to buy a kids style detector because they typically have a hard time swinging anything heavy and when you get a light kids version like this Bounty Hunter they typically don’t go very deep, and if a kid isn’t pulling coins out every two feet well…you all know what happens their attention span fly’s out the door.

Anyway when we arrived at the first beach we unpacked and found that the clouds and overcast had kept the beach fairly vacant which is perfect for us we… or I should say (I) worked about a hundred yards with nothing but bottle caps…not good because my daughter gets her lack of attention span from ME!! So we left for another beach just down the road.

The next beach we hit was called “The Silver Strand” State Beach and it usually charges 10 bucks to get in during the summer months and stops charging after Labor Day so I thought I was in good shape but when I arrived low and behold there was indeed a park ranger at the booth wanting ten bucks from ol’ Bucket. I told her I thought they quit charging after Labor Day and she said they charge year round now…no problem I thought to myself, I’ll just flash her my credentials (a Bucket&Boomer T-shirt) have my daughter giver her the sad eye’s and we’ll be on our way for free!! Anyway..so after getting the boot from what I would consider a very unwavering park ranger, we were parked across the road in a residential area…(for free I might add) and making our way to the beach, when we got there we fired up our detectors and got to work, now being the first time I’ve ever used this detector I’m not about to slap on some hip waders and get waist deep in the hoopla (Pacific Ocean) I wanted to figure some things out first, and let me tell you that the learning curve for this particular beach detector…as is with most Tesoro’s  is very short!

In no time I was yerking up bottle caps 10 inches down (yes I did say “Yerking” its Cali talk for “digging up”) so I new I was on the right track, I worked the storm break of piled sand and in one three foot area between me and my daughter we pulled up 34 pennies in our sand scoops, one of them being a 1927 wheat cent or wheatie! At one point we were scooping pennies three at a time from their sandy graves…a bonified cache!!  (OK maybe that’s going a bit too far), and as the pennies thinned out so did my kids attention span so I was left to myself to work the rest of the storm break while she chased birds up and down the beach. As I headed south down the break I hit a nickel then a dime…at this point I’d swear I was “Loaming” as the denominations were getting bigger then I ran into a Heineken bottle cap , and another and another so I figured there should be roughly six of these screwing me up, if I can gather all six I should be clear of these false treasures, well at around ten of em I was impressed with this guys drinking skills and knew I had a twelve pack to contend with, once I found that 12^th and final cap I was happy now I could focus on this area…sure enough..no more bottle caps and shortly thereafter I pulled up a couple dimes, a quarter and a very thin and fake gold ring!

Day One.

The afternoon had by now, given way to the evening and it was getting dark and time to call it a day, but I was very happy with the way that this metal detector handled the beach, it was very stable, very easy to use, fairly light and best of all very reasonably priced, as a matter of fact…I would actually call it a steal!!  I plan on…in the coming months regularly using this Tesoro Sandshark and posting on its successes. Terry motivated me to get back to the beach and now its my turn to pass it on!! So get out there all you taters at home and make your own……LEMONADE !!!!!!!