On Friday May 12 after getting my son off to daycare. My partner was just getting off working night shift and I knew she would need some quiet in the house, so of course my first plan of action was to give her the quiet peaceful rest she deserved.

Well what better time for some me time? I grabbed my detecting gear and headed an hour north to Sharbot Lake public beach to do some beach detecting. Now, I’ve never been to this beach before so I really didn’t know what to expect. I figured possibly some modern clad and hoped for some jewellery, maybe even some gold if I lucked out?

When I got to the beach I was a bit disappointed in the size of the beach itself. The water levels were high and only a small fragment of beachfront was exposed.

There was a fairly nice sized park and play structure there however a few families seemed to be occupying the space so it was the bit of beach or nothing. As soon as I started scanning the beach I hit several high pitched targets with VDI numbers of approx 45 on my screen, & out popped a few modern copper Pennie’s. Wasn’t a terrible way to start off, I mean let’s face it. It’s been worse, like, much worse. Lol

It only took about 10- 15 minutes to cover the entire Sandy area and I ended up with 2 children’s toy cars, 5 copper Pennie’s, and a modern zinc quarter.

I had driven all the way out there so I really wasn’t into leaving just yet. So I decided (although still a bit early in the season) that today would be a good test for my legend to get in the water.

Like I said tho, still a bit cold. So I kept my shoes and socks on. And my pants and decided to walk right in. I didn’t want to go to deep as I did not bring a change of clothes and had nothing to dry off with either. The air temp was nice. (Approximately +23° Celsius) so I knew I would dry off, however nevertheless I would not get in above my knees.

This dig would run into a day of really trying to figure out my machine, play with all the features and settings, you know, bond with my legend. I strolled back and forth in an approx 80 X 10 foot section. Each time I swung over the section I would use a different frequency setting to see if the machine would detect anything different. A couple passes between Multi 1 , then 2, then Frequencies 4, 10, 20, & 40. Every time I passed by the same areas something else would trigger my detector. Wether it be a bottle cap or pull tab or maybe a hairpin, and even a rusty nail. It wasn’t until I tried setting up the machine with a gold pattern when I started seeing a couple goods come to life.

I had set the machine up on gold mode not beach wet mode, even though I was in the water, my sensitivity set to 27, recovery speed at 2, discrimination was set to only allow signals on my VDI between 16, to 25 and set with only 1 tone a high tone set to 30. I had taken all my iron VDI’s off my machine as I was only looking for gold with this setting.

Once all set up I started combing my same 80X 10 foot section and so even slowed down my swing a bit. It was approx 10 minutes in and I heard my first beep on the machine, a shallow signal and it was a 17/18 on the VDI. But because it was shallow I didn’t have much hope. Infact the first 3 signals were all the same and my suspicions were confirmed when I started digging nothing but aluminum foil.

Then a solid 18 hit on my VDI and it was about 4 arrows down indicating a better target at approx 8 inches. Now my interest was peaked. After about a minute and 3 or 4 scoops with my shovel, my first piece of gold jewelry had surfaced for 2023, it was a 10k gold angel earring,

Then about 10 minutes later and now finished 3/4 of my area to detect in the water I hit a solid #23 on the VDI, & approx 3 arrows or 6” below the Sandy bottom, and a Golden wedding band was now in my possession

Now reaching the end of my searchable area, I was pretty happy with my finds as it was and I was about to give up when my machine started chirping once again. This time a solid #17 on my VDI. I checked this one out on my Minelab 600 when I got home and it rang up a #1 on that machine. It ended up a golden cross. It did have a bit of a dent in it as I may have hit it with my shovel trying to get it out of the ground.

Now I had come to the end of the search area again and I only had about 45min left before I had to start packing up and thinking of heading back to go and pick up my son at daycare. So I changed my settings on my machine once again but this time to be able to pick up signals with a higher conductivity such as copper and silver.

About 15 minutes had passed and I had a #43 hit the Legend. I know #’s45 &46 are usually a copper Penny, anything from 41 to 55 can be a silver something, so hopefully this was a bit of silver, like a dime or maybe a silver quarter.

And then I had 1 more target before I left that beach for the day. Again a low 40’s on my machine and once again I started getting excited. For some reason any time my machine reads in the 40’s the targets are decent finds.

Anyway this time round was no different. I had dug up a copper religious pendant of some kind. I have yet to look it up and do the research but I do like getting these. It is now my second one.

This concluded my awesome day of digging and my introduction into water detecting at Sharbot Lake Public Beach.