Family is doing a mall crawl (something I will not do under any circumstances, especially this time of year), so I got to do some detecting this morning.  I may even get to tomorrow morning if it doesn’t rain.

Anyway, a member of our Facebook club put together a hunt for this morning, it was an hour and a quarter drive for me, but I decided what the hell, I just wanted to meet some of the other people.

I had no time to do any research on the site, and had no idea where to go, so I just started milling around these woods more or less where everyone else was, and was finding nothing.  As far as I could read the terrain, the woods were second growth (reclaimed farmland), so it was like hunting a farm field.  I couldn’t even get iron nulls, and if you ain’t gettin’ that, the odds of getting anything else at an old site are between slim and none.

Eventually I did find where an old house was, you can tell from the domestic vegetation, bricks, and so forth, and most importantly, constant iron nulls.  So I focused there for quite some time, carefully gridding, and still got nothing but junk.  I did have one heart pounding moment when I found a small ceramic jar with a metal lid, I says, ok here is my first cache, but it was empty.

I was about 2 hours in, and still had not found a single coin or other keeper.  These sorts of hunts can be like this, and more often than not they are for me.

Burnt out on constant nulling/TTF, I decided to go into the purer woods from the homesite grass for some peace, got a 12-43 which I figured was a wheatie or a copper, but it turned out to be an abused 1919 merc.  Are you kidding me?  Just randomly in the woods when the homesite turned up bupkis.

Then I found an old road bed, and this was something worth focusing on, and I hit a spill of a wheatie and a 1946 Q.  On the board with my second silver of the day.  Two ahead of what I expected.  There was also a huge hunk of iron in the hole.  First I got the iron, and I said, are you kidding me?  I hear silver in here.  Scanned again, got the wheatie.  Scanned again, got the Q.

Found another old roadbed and got another weird signal, but I heard silver in there.  I pulled out of that hole 2 coppers fused together, a silver dime (1913 Canadian), and a huge hunk of iron.

The above pic shows the coppers fused together.  I cannot identify either one.  Here is a side view of the fusion —

After forcing the coppers apart, I still can’t identify them.  Since they were shallow, were in a hole with a Canadian dime, and rang a little light  (12-40 range), I’m think the possibility is that they are Canadian large cents (tho some early 1800 American LCs have been pulled from this site by others), who knows?  The one with the X looks like it has a bust, the other looks like a mirror image of that bust.  The one with the X also looks like it has the LC wreath on the back.  I’ll never know; scored as unidentifiables/smoothies.

One final thought on the iron.  At sites like this, it seems if you are not getting lots of iron junk, your odds of a silver or copper are low (occasionally you get a random one in the woods for fields, but that is rare, at least for me).

Below is the iron I had to deal with in 2 of the 3 holes with silver.  The Q is for size reference.  The smaller piece was on top of the wheatie and the Q in that hole, and the E-Trac still heard the silver; the larger piece was in the hole with that Canadian dime and fused copper pair.

All in all a fine morning hunt when I did not expect to find anything.