My maiden treasure hunt with a metal detector

Sparkling had got me a metal detector for my birthday, which may have been an insight on her behalf as I was going through a patch of watching metal detecting on vids on youtube. They are without doubt compulsive viewing, especially as one man likes to find German military paraphernalia in Germany, bombs included.  So about a month had passed and now Sparkling has a batch of batteries which will fit it as well and we head out to a local park which is based around a reservoir. The thing is when looking for treasure there is always the hope of coming across a big haul of gold and valuable stuff, even a really old coin would be good, it could be worth a few bob. It's this desire to become rich from doing relatively little, in the back of our minds I think most people have this thought.  Maybe it's why so many people still by lottery tickets.  The thing is though, what you want and the reality of what you get are complete opposites.  This happened to be the result of our maiden treasure hunt as well.

Firstly I had to work out how to use the detector and try to understand what was the difference between the two metal types known as ferrous and non-ferrous metals. For the little needle on the detector bounces along two different scales, depending if a metal is one of these types.  It was easy to find out that ferrous means something made from an iron. In my mind then a non ferrous metal meant finding riches.  I worked out how to set the detector at zero and the discrimination by tuning it, then with Wellington boots a two litre bottle of water and a small gardening fork we set off. Even Sparkling had her nice fur lined Wellies fished out of the cupboard.

The treasure hunt was on, I moved the detector backwards and forwards hovering it and scraping it over the soil.  With ear buds plugged in I listened and occasionally it would buzz or go silent.  The first item we found was a 2 pence coin, the second was a metal non-ferrous tent peg, the third a bit of old wire, the fourth another 2 pence coin, the fifth was an old decaying pot handle, the sixth a button the seventh a rusty bent and broken hand saw and the last two items were non ferrous crushed larger cans.  So in a matter of about two hours we'd made a grand profit of 4 pence.  So regardless of the very small treasure haul what I did find out was the detector actually worked. It could find stuff and I had been a successful detective in this respect although an unsuccessful treasure hunter. Now had we actually found something even if it was minor league valuable then it would of been interesting.

As it was I enjoyed the experience and it was nice for once to have got outside and done something with Sparkling, but one thing for sure, the well trodden paths of park land don't have much in the way of gold at all.