My best day of metal detecting started just like most others: hunting one of my old stand-bys. Today’s stand-by was a university campus, originally constructed in the 1890s.
My first two hours yielded nothing more than a single wheat cent and I considered giving up. Soon after that, I dug a silver ring followed by my very first Morgan silver dollar. The Morgan rang up exactly like a silver dollar. On the surface, the signal was jumping from 1-38 to 1-44 on my E-TRAC, with a few dips down to around the 10-47 area. Eight inches down, the ground broke free and I saw a flash of silver. I instantly knew what I had in the hole. I reached in and pulled it out. I was shaking. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe I was holding this giant silver disc in my hand. Thirty years of metal detecting and I had never pulled one of these beauties from the soil. All I could manage was to sit and stare at it in my hand. That was when I saw the date, 1882. I looked at the space I had hunted so far and there was a lot left to cover. I said to myself, “if this silver cartwheel could still be in the ground, there HAS to be more! It’s time to get digging.”
I put my E-TRAC back to work and kept walking parallel lines as I continued gridding the space. As I kept hunting, the silver kept flowing. I found an 1899 Barber dime, followed by Mercury dime after Mercury dime and then a rough, jumpy signal. I opened up the quick-mask screen and found most of the numbers in the 20-44 to 26-45 range, but it never went into the iron corner so I had to dig it. I dug up a Standing Liberty quarter to add to my growing totals.
I’m sure this place has been hunted A LOT. I was finding so few modern coins I knew it had been hunted recently as well. But today, it was like all the stars aligned just for this spot. I was afraid to stop hunting because the mojo might go away.
Fatigue made me finally call it a day, but I was leaving with fourteen Wheaties, 2 tokens, and an even dozen silvers in my pouch. As I headed home I couldn’t stop replaying the day’s events in my head. I had found a dream find, a Morgan dollar and I had found more silver than in any hunt before. But why? I was hunting a big space and I figured most others would meander randomly or hit the edges and call it good. I worked parallel lines back and forth, gridding the space, but of course I can’t ignore the E-TRAC’s ability to sniff out coins that are just impossible for other machines to see.
People ask me why I consider THIS hunt as my best. I've found older coins, and more valuable finds. But finding a Morgan dollar has been on my want list for 30 years and the sheer number of silver coins AND the number of wheat cents both surpasses anything I’ve ever found in a single hunt. So that is what made THIS the best hunt in 30 years of detecting.
Jason - OK, USA
