Chocolate cake!!!!

Last time I wrote it was a hot dry summer. The ground was baked as hard as rock and it crumbled in our hands like crackers over a bowl of hot french pea soup. The hot summer turned to cold winter and there was no metal detecting to be done. Even if I found a penny in the Walmart parking lot I was tempted to write a blog entry. But I wanted to keep my entries pure.

About a week ago Mary and I started to notice that the long winter was finally over. The temperature was starting to warm up and the ground was starting to dry out. She remembered a hill that has been used for tobogganing even before her parents were kids. I had visions of kids with snowsuits bulging with spare change cartwheeling off their sled scattering coins across the hill like an exploding Deathstar.

Today was a beautiful day. The ground was like rich chocolate cake under my shovel. If Mary told me the metal was 2 inches down and my shovel sunk 6 inches pulling up divots the size of soccer balls. I had brought my GPS along to track where we had been so we didn't neglect any part of the hill.

We started at the bottom but had little luck. We wandered over to some old trees hoping that someone might had rested there dumping their pockets, but we didn't find very much. We went back to the top and found one sweet-spot that contained 3 loonies. Other locations at the top revealed quarters and nickels.

We had another metal hit and I poked my pin-pointer into the hole to find the exact location. I extracted the muddy tip and dug further in the spot. When I went to re-check the hole, the pinpointed went off in midair. I figured I must have bumped the sensitivity and I started turning the knob down to recalibrate it. But it kept going off in midair. At this point I thought that last years batteries must have died. I brushed off the mud in order to take the unit apart and there stuck to the end of the sensor was a dime!

We went to a nearby hill and didn't even receive one hit. Our arms were tired and my back was sore from bending and digging. We started to make our way back to the car and Mary got a hit. Inches away she got another and then another! But it didn't stop there, she got almost two dozen hits within a 4ft circle! We both sat in the grass, her with the big detector and the hand shovel and me with the pin-pointer and the big shovel. We worked independently pulling out penny after penny. I became exhausted and I discovered how amazing it is to lay on a grassy hill in the sun while staring at the blue sky.

A car pulled off the road and stopped beside ours. I became concerned that the public land we were on might actually have an owner after all. But it was Mary's cousin Steve, his wife Nadine and daughter Sherry who recognized our car while driving past. Steve was excited to see our equipment and said we want to get out detecting with his own gear. He told us about family lands that might hold treasures from back to the 1800's!!! He wants to take us there next week and help us scan it. We are extremely excited!

After and good talk they left and we replaced the divots, deciding to come back another day to re-scan the same spot.

Here is a picture of the metal that we found today. I had no idea what it some of it was as I put the balls of mud into the plastic bag inside my jacket.
It cleaned up very nice in our laundry sink. There is $5.54 in change as well as beer caps and beer openers. I hope the muddy knees of my pants clean up just as nice.