Hi, I am Karel and I want to share my success story with you. On the 1st of November I, my son and my neighbour attended a detector rally in Wilp, The Netherlands. This was our first detector rally and we didn’t know what to expect, mainly because of the thought of detecting with two hundred other detectorists at the same place. In the morning we started the first half of the rally on some corn fields. Besides the normal things we could find there where tokens hidden. And these tokens were exchangeable for a lottery ticket. So we could win some great prizes at the end of the rally. I turned on my Minelab Safari and began my hunt. After two hours of searching the fields the first half of the rally ended. And I found some objects but none of them were really good, nor did I find any tokens.
After having lunch and talking about our experiences, we began with the second half of the rally. This time we went to a different corn field and it looked a bit smaller. At first we walked across the field to start at the end near the fence. I turned on my Minelab Safari and started detecting again. After some minutes of searching I found my first token. It was a French 5 francs coin. So to hunt for more I kept walking around with my detector avoiding other detectorist’s paths. I reached the end of the field where we had crossed it at the beginning, and because of all the footsteps there I wondered if someone had already been there. But after walking some meters in that area I got a real good signal and I started digging. I used my pin pointer and I found an old Willem cent.
To make sure I didn’t miss something I checked the same area again, and I heard more good signals coming from a few centimetres from the first hole. Again I went digging now accompanied by my son who saw me digging the first time. And then more and more copper coins were coming out of the hole. It looked like they were all Willem cents. On some of the coins I already could see the dates 1823 and 1827. During the time I was digging and pinpointing for more coins. More and more people gathered round to see what was going on and eventually they helped me out to find all of the coins buried there. In the end a total of fifty-eight copper coins were found. A real coin hoard! Unbelievable, it was the first time that I found something like this! I couldn’t stop smiling. I was invited to do some interviews. The next couple of days it was all over the news.
I want to thank DJLaan and Roy Hutters again for organizing this great detecting day. P.S. I attached a Youtube video from HoardFinderNL; He made a video of the rally that day. At 9:17 of this video you can see me digging up the coin hoard.
Karel – North Holland, Netherlands
