I had the afternoon off work so some time with the Minelab CTX 3030 was in order. We had just had some storms around Melbourne so the chance of some erosion on the beach was possible. I reset the detector to the factory pre-sets, did a noise cancel, put it into beach mode and turned on the target trace. I find the target trace to be very helpful in giving more information about the target helping me to decide whether to dig it or not. If there is a streaky pattern on the screen the target is probably junk.
It was low tide so some sand flats were exposed. I detected some wet and dry sand for a while. The first coin (20c) came up on the dry sand after about 15 minutes. I moved to another area where the sand was a bit steeper and a few rocks were poking through the sand. I detected a 5c and 2c coin close together. The beach was very narrow because of a bluestone wall. I moved to another dry sand area, where the beach cleaning machine operates, near a rubbish bin. I had found some coins here in the past. The beach cleaning machine turns around here. A couple of coins were found on the dry sand. At the water’s edge the sand had been moved around quite a bit but there were lots of light material (aluminium) to be detected.
I moved back to the narrow strip of sand and started detecting a bit more thoroughly. I found a couple of sinkers and thought, this is better, there are some heavier targets here. Along this narrow strip 1 and 2 cents coins started coming up and then a $1 and a couple of $2 coins. A penny also came to light (1949 after cleaning) and what looked like the outer part of an old watch and a cheap ring was also found. It was great fun for 3 hours digging up 25 coins for $7, 4 sinkers, part of a watch and a ring. I learnt from today that if I start finding heavy targets spend more time around that area.
