Today was the 4th Farewell Farewell Friday hunt at my current honeyhole, and while I did not expect to pull silver from the remaining zone, I managed both a merc and a Q. Not bad, and we’ll certainly take it, cause silver on Farewell Farewell day is special (you try operating an E-Trac on man 30 after a couple of Golden Monkey’s :)), cause you are in the least promising zones.
Got the merc 45 minutes in; its sweet getting early silver, cause you know you avoid the dreaded Silverless Drive of Shame, and you can enjoy lunch even more knowing that it will be a successful hunt (and any detectorist will tell you one silver is a successful hunt). You have that glowing feeling that the rest of the hunt is on the house.
The merc was just on the edge of a roadside swale; I love detecting roadsides cause the competition avoids them in droves, but I’m not too fond of swales, cause obviously the evil fill and grade twins have been there, but when you think about it, the dirt had to be pushed around from somewhere (most logically the local honeyhole), so there could still be silver there, and you may luck into one, as I did today.
After lunch, the zone seemed quite a bit tougher. Was it the aforementioned copious quantities of Golden Monkey, or a change in mineralization? Who knows, but likely the latter, as the auto rec was high teens low 20s compared to mid 20s for the rest of the site. Makes the detecting challenging for sure, but at least the E-Trac kept giving me channel 9 in this zone. Target after target sounded like a deep silver, but each ended in frustration with either a wheatie or deep clad. Had 4 10-46s in a row, and each of them turned out to be a memorial penny. Are you kidding me? High mineralization tends to confuse the E-Trac’s brilliant TID at depth, but I think it confuses the competition more, given the amount of deep clad I dug in this zone compared to the rest of the site.
Eventually got a deep 09-48, difficult signal, and said, ok this must be silver, and sure enough it was the 42 Q. We’ll take it. My guess is that several silver dimes were missed in this zone due to the mineralization (I’ve got 2 Q’s and a half, and the dime on the swale which doesn’t really count; were are the deep silver dimes?). No doubt out of reach — need a land-based PI machine to get them, and I don’t have the patience for such.
Anyway, this honeyhole gave up 54 silvers in the end (including a dime grand slam, Q trifecta, walker, half reale, draped bust LC, KG II copper), over about a month, making it my 6th best site ever (missing a tie for 5th by one silver), and my best site of the year. Turns out to be my 3rd honeyhole of the year, and I’m not expecting another, maybe ever.
It was fun while it lasted, but all things must pass. There is always a sadness in closing a site, especially a honeyhole. Today’s Farewell Farewell artist has got to be Annie Haslam; just feels like that sort of day.