Today is June 14^th 2023, the day started out wet, raining, & really not a day to be out detecting but since I only have a couple of days off in a row I decided that detecting was on the agenda anyway.

 

I decided to head into Kingston ON to the gord Downie public beach. Since the area had seen some decent weather over the past few weeks I thought maybe some people had been attending the beach and I might be into some goodies. As it turns out there really wasn’t much to be had. With only $0.25 in Canadian clad, a few pull tabs, and a broken toy car I can’t say that the dig itself was a huge success.

 

The best part of the day was when a young family with two small children decided to come to the beach and play in the sand. The father of the young family came up to me and asked me if I was filming my digs? I told him I was. He then showed me an orange pinpointer which I thought was a Garrett carrot but turned out to be a cheap Amazon imitation. He said that his three-year old son loved trying to find treasure in the sand.

 

So I asked him if I could show his young son my metal detector the Nokta Legend. With approval from his father I shortened my legend to a suitable size for a three-year old child then guided his little arm pass the armrest and told him to hold on with both hands and slowly start swinging the detector from side to side. The young boy seemed super excited to be using the metal detector.

 

I had planted a coin which I had found in my own backyard just two days prior into the sand a 1947 KG6 Canadian penny.

The boy went over this area with my metal detector and when he heard a beep, he immediately bent down and tried to look for it with his hands, however I asked his father to hand him his own pin pointer which he did handed it to the little boy and the boy found the little penny with his own pin pointer.

Both mom and dad seem super happy that I would have planted a penny in the sand for their son to find, they actually tried to give it back to me, but I told the little boy to keep it. Mom and dad had a closer look at the penny and realized that it was an older penny and again tried to give it back to me. I laughed a little and told them it was OK with me if their little boy kept it.

Over the past year and a half I have dug literally tens of thousands of holes all over southeastern Ontario and I’ve probably only dug up maybe 10 pennies older than 1950. I’ve probably dug up about $5 to $8 worth of small cents since I’ve started this hobby, so to have a penny in the 1940s (A King George the 6^th) is actually quite special and hard to come by find.

Now the family probably didn’t realize that the penny I had just given their son has taken me a year and a half to find but if they do any research on it they may start to understand.

This is part of the hobby that I think I like the most,, meeting new people, and giving the opportunity to youngsters, such as this 3 year old boy, giving him a chance to get into the hobby and enjoy it even if they don’t really understand what they’re doing at this age. It may be possible that when that little boy gets older he will have a positive outlook on metal detecting just because of the good experience he had when he was 3 years old, when his dad took him to a local beach. Who knows, it could happen lol.

Now Gord Downie public beach is a relatively small beach I had covered the entire thing in about an hour, so I decided to head up north along highway 34 to a small town called Harrowsmith.

There really isn’t much around Harrowsmith, But it’s not far from where I live and only a few weeks ago there was a large festival with over 5 to 600 people in attendance. This festival had many bands playing and people were sitting all over the grass area at the time, so even though it was raining I decided to chance my luck and see if people had dropped anything of value during that festival.

As it turns out and as I covered the majority of the area where people would have been sitting during that festival I came up pretty much empty handed I couldn’t believe nobody had dropped anything not even modern day Canadian coins.

I switched gears and decided to stop looking for surface finds after about an hour had passed. Now I was looking for deeper targets that may be lurking. I stayed for another hour to hour and a half and ended up with a looney, I think about four pennies, A toy truck, and a

1941 Silver $0.10 coin from the Netherlands. That means this silver $0.10 coin was a World War II coin.

I looked up what was happening in the Netherlands in 1941 and Needless to say it wasn’t pretty.

In 1941 there was a Jewish council that was established in the Netherlands there were arrests of several hundred young Jews sent to concentration camps Which led to a general strike by the Dutch Workers. On February 25^th 1941, German officials brutally Suppress the strike. This action was Followed by a hardening In Nazi policy.

So I’m not sure exactly what this Netherland silver 10 cent piece from 1941 was doing in Harrowsmith ON Buried approximately 7 inches below the ground in a public park, but after looking it up I realized that once again I was able to unearth a little bit of history today.

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